Psychological distress through immigration: The two-phase temporal pattern?

A large community sample, cross-sectional and in part longitudinal design, and comparison groups was used to determine the timing of psychological dis tress among immigrants. A total of 2,378 adult immigrants from the former S oviet Union to Israel completed the self-administered questionnaire Talbieh Brief Distress Inventory. The aggregate levels of distress and six psychol ogical symptoms obsessiveness, hostility, interpersonal sensitivity, depres sion, anxiety, and paranoid ideation - were compared at 20 intervals coveri ng 1 to 60 months after resettlement. The level of psychological distress w as significantly higher in the immigrants than that of Israeli natives but not in the potential immigrant controls. A two-phase temporal pattern of de velopment of psychological distress was revealed consisting of escalation a nd reduction phases. The escalation phase was characterized by an increase in distress levels until the 27th month after arrival (a peak) and the redu ction phase led to a decline returning to normal levels. The 1-month preval ence rate was 15.6% for the total sample, and for highly distressed subject s it reached 24% at the 27th month after arrival, and it declined to 4% at the 44th month. The time pattern of distress shared males and females, marr ied and divorced/widowed (but not singles), as well as subjects of all age groups (except for immigrants in their forties). The two-phase pattern of d istress obtained according to cross-sectional data was indirectly confirmed through a longitudinal way. Claims of early euphoric or distress-free peri od followed by mental health crisis frequently referred to in the literatur e on migration was not supported by this study.