Migrazione e salute mentale: un problema emergente

• Main Author: Luca Cimino
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Società Italiana di Vittimologia 2015-05-01
• Series: Rivista di Criminologia, Vittimologia e Sicurezza
• Online Access: http://www.vittimologia.it/rivista/articolo_cimino_2015-01.pdf

Mental health of migrants is nowadays one of the greatest individual and public health problems Italy and Europe are facing. The increasing number of migrants who access mental health services shows not only new typologies of psychic distress linked to specific cultural and ethnic dimensions of every population, but also the fact that migrants are a fragile group at risk of developing mental disorders. Scientific evidence accumulated in the past years about migrants’ increased risk of developing severe mental illnesses, such as psychosis, lead to a general review of interpretative models about the genesis of mental illness. This is because these models noted the importance of environmental stressors on the development of these disorders, showing that cultural characteristics and migrant backgrounds can have a big impact not only on the risk of developing a mental disorder, but also the response to treatments.