Prevalence of Mental Health Issues in the Borderlands: A Comparative Perspective

The purpose of this paper is to (a) examine the results of a binational study of two colonias near El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, focusing on mental health and (b) analyze those results in relation to the existing literature on Hispanic mental health to determine how border regions compare with Hispanic enclaves in nonborder regions. We focus on gender, birthplace, length of residency, and level of acculturation correlated with self-reported diagnoses of depression in our analysis. Our survey instrument incorporates portions of the Behavioral Risk Factor and Surveillance Survey; the SF36, version 2; and the CAGE scale for alcohol use and abuse. We found that birthplace, acculturation, and length of residency at the border did not correlate in the same ways to mental health issues as in nonborder regions.