Depressive symptoms among Latino farmworkers across the agricultural season: Structural and situational influences.

Abstract

Immigrant Latino farmworkers confront multiple challenges that threaten their mental health. Previous farmworker mental health research has relied primarily on cross-sectional study designs, leaving little opportunity to describe how farmworker mental health changes or to identify factors that may contribute to these changes. This study used prospective data obtained at monthly intervals across one four-month agricultural season from a large sample of Latino farmworkers in NC (N=288) to document variation in depressive symptoms across the agricultural season and delineate structural and situational factors associated with mental health trajectories across time. Depressive symptoms generally followed a U-shaped distribution across the season, but there was substantial variation in this pattern. Structural stressors like marital status and situational stressors like the pace of work, crowded living conditions, and concerns about documentation predicted depressive symptoms. The pattern of results suggests that strategies to address mental health problems in this vulnerable population will require coordinated action at the individual and social level.

Work and Health Among Latina Mothers in Farmworker Families

“…Depressive symptoms were assessed with the Spanish validated short version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale (CES-D). 40 This 10-item version of the scale delineates the frequency and severity of current depressive symptoms. 41 Items were scored in a 4-point scale and summed.…”

Profiles of Food Security for US Farmworker Households and Factors Related to Dynamic of Change

“…This approach is appropriate for hard-to-reach populations, and has been used in the investigators’ previous immigrant health research, 21–23 based on well-developed relationships with farmworker-serving institutions. “Sites” are organizations or locations with which members of the target community are associated.…”

Immigration as a Social Determinant of Health

“…The additional burden that immigrants face, however, is that they often choose not to interact with government services that could provide some relief to their situations out of fear that the interaction could lead to deportation or family separation. Some articles provide reviews focused on subpopulations of immigrants, including farmworkers (134), women (91), and children (91,118), whereas others examine how the stress of racial discrimination, lack of legal status, and general exclusion affects mental health (27,127,148), and specifically depression (46,51,72). Many immigrant groups experience discrimination that exacerbates the challenges of living as immigrants (117,148) or results in lower self-worth (111).…”