You have been here eight years. You have a job, a car, kids who speak better English than you do. And still there are mornings when you wake up with a sadness you cannot find a place to put, or a song comes on the radio and your throat closes. It did not happen when you arrived. It is happening now.

If that sounds familiar, you are not failing and you are not ungrateful. What you feel has a name: immigration grief, what the clinical literature calls migratory grief. It is grief for everything that stayed on the other side, and one feature makes it hard to admit: nobody died. Your mother answers the phone. Your street still exists. But you cannot walk back into any of it the way you used to, and a loss with no funeral is the hardest kind to name.

What immigration grief is, and why it is not an illness

The psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui, of the University of Barcelona, has described this process better than anyone. Writing in the International Journal of Family and Community Medicine, he is emphatic that the extreme form of this grief "is not a mental disorder" but "belongs to the area of mental health, the area of stress and mourning" (Achotegui, 2022). He also warns against the "hyper medicalization of the suffering of immigrants" — treating as sick people who are living through a very difficult situation of stress.

Achotegui's article for Family and Community Medicine adds the other key idea: this grief is partial (you keep much of your life, but lose what is essential), recurring (the pain returns through homesickness, a slight, a wall you hit trying to belong), and multiple. It is not a straight line with an end; it is a cycle that reactivates.

The seven griefs of migration

Achotegui identifies seven griefs in migration, each tied to a central area of a life. Most people recognize two or three:

  • Family and loved ones — attachment, and the forced separations millions of people are living through.
  • Language, especially for someone with no real chance to learn the language of the host country.
  • Culture — your way of seeing the world, your sense of time, your religion, your values.
  • Homeland — the landscape, the intensity of the light, the temperature, the colors, the smells.
  • Social status — access to legal documents, to legal work, to housing.
  • The group you belong to — prejudice, discrimination, xenophobia, racism.
  • Physical safety — the dangers of the journey, injury in extreme working conditions, bad housing.

The fourth one sounds poetic until your third February in Northeast Ohio, when you realize what you miss most is a temperature.

Achotegui adds a clarification that lifts a lot of guilt. Living these griefs in good conditions, living them with difficulty but still getting ahead, and living them with no possibility of working them through are three different situations — simple, complicated, and extreme grief, the last of which he named Ulysses syndrome. How hard this hits depends largely on the conditions you landed in, not on your strength of character.

Why it hits years later instead of on arrival

Almost nobody cries in the first year. There is no time: work, paperwork, somewhere to live. The body goes into survival mode and the grief waits.

It shows up once things steady — once the rent is covered and the schedule is fixed and there is room to feel something. That is when the question arrives that surprises people: why am I sadder now than when things were genuinely bad?

Milestones set it off too. A parent who gets sick back home. A funeral you could not attend. NAMI notes that a person born in the United States to immigrant parents may experience conflict between the attitudes, beliefs, and values of the parents' culture and those more prevalent here. For a parent, watching that distance grow inside their own house is one more loss, rarely named as grief.

The guilt of leaving, and the money you send home

There is a part of immigration grief almost nobody says out loud: guilt. For having left. For being better off. For not being there when they buried your grandmother and you watched on a video call.

There is a concrete layer too. Sending money home is an act of love and a standing obligation, and many people carry two budgets at once and spend nothing on themselves, because every dollar has somebody's name on it. When someone says "I can't afford therapy," what is true is sometimes "I don't feel entitled to spend that on me." Taking care of your mental health does not take anything from the people who depend on you.

Certain dates concentrate all of it: December, Mother's Day, your country's independence day. Planning for them in advance is prevention, not sentimentality.

Landing in Orlando is not the same as landing in Akron

Where you arrive changes the shape of the grief. In Central Florida — Orlando, Kissimmee, Tampa — there is a large Puerto Rican and Venezuelan community: the food you grew up with, Spanish on the street, churches in your language. Grief for language and homeland weighs less. But another appears: landing among people "like you" and still feeling alone has its own confusion.

In Northeast Ohio — Akron, Stow, Cuyahoga Falls, Cleveland — it runs the other way. The Hispanic community exists but is spread out, and you can go a week without hearing Spanish outside your own kitchen. Add a winter that is not only cold but months of low light and real isolation. That isolation is a risk factor, not a weakness of character. Neither version is easier.

When immigration grief becomes depression or anxiety

Immigration grief comes in waves — good days and bad days. Depression is flatter and steadier. MedlinePlus describes depression as a serious mood disorder whose symptoms interfere with daily activities and last at least two weeks.

Talk with a professional if several of these hold steady:

  • Sadness or emptiness most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or more.
  • Losing interest in what you used to enjoy, including calls home.
  • Chronically poor sleep, or sleeping too much; marked changes in appetite.
  • Constant worry, a racing heart, tightness in the chest, no way to quiet your head.
  • Drinking more than usual to fall asleep or to stop thinking.
  • Feeling your family would be better off without you.

That last one is not something to watch; it gets attention today. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline answers in Spanish, 24 hours a day, free and confidential.

One number explains the delay. According to the HHS Office of Minority Health, in 2024 Hispanic/Latino adults were 28% less likely than U.S. adults overall to have received mental health treatment in the past year — not because they suffer less, but because access, language, and stigma get in the way.

What actually helps

  • Naming it. Saying "this is immigration grief" settles something: it stops being a character flaw and becomes a process with a logic.
  • Concrete rituals. Cooking the food from home. A standing Sunday call. Teaching your children where their last names come from. Grief is worked through in acts, not only words.
  • Community, even small. One person you can talk to without translating changes a whole week.
  • Therapy in your own language. As MedlinePlus notes, grief therapy helps many people — and language is not a logistical detail here. The homesickness, the guilt, and the childhood memories live in Spanish, and translating them flattens them. Individual therapy in Spanish lets you say things the way you feel them.

When immigration grief is straining a marriage or your relationship with your children, family therapy is often the better entry point.

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal to miss my country after ten years here? Yes, and it is expected. This grief is recurring by nature: it returns on anniversaries, on holidays, when someone at home gets sick. Feeling it at year ten does not mean you failed to adapt.

Is Ulysses syndrome a mental illness? No. Achotegui is explicit that it is not a mental disorder but a symptom picture reactive to stress, in situations of extreme migratory grief that cannot be worked through. He proposed the term so people under extreme stress would not be treated as sick.

How do I know whether it is grief or already depression? Grief comes in waves and leaves gaps of relief; depression is steadier. MedlinePlus places the line at symptoms lasting at least two weeks and interfering with daily activities. More than two weeks unable to function as you used to calls for a professional evaluation.

Can I get therapy in Spanish if I live in Florida? Yes, by teletherapy. Quez Therapeutic Solutions sees Spanish-speaking clients by video anywhere in Florida and anywhere in Ohio, through online sessions. You do need to be physically in Florida during the session.

Does therapy help if my problem is money or immigration paperwork? Therapy does not resolve a filing and does not pay rent. It does help with what those realities do to your sleep, your anxiety, your patience with your kids, and the sense of carrying it alone.

When to seek professional support

If several of these signs sound familiar, talking with a licensed therapist is a reasonable step. Joselyn Vasquez, LISW-S, has practiced since 2003, and at Quez Therapeutic Solutions in Stow, Ohio, she offers individual, couples, family, and teen therapy (ages 7 and up) in Spanish and English — in person in Stow, with clients from Akron, Hudson, Cuyahoga Falls, Summit County, and the Cleveland area, and by teletherapy anywhere in Ohio and anywhere in Florida. Her work draws on cognitive behavioral therapy, solution-focused therapy, trauma-informed care, and family systems. The practice accepts many insurance plans and offers self-pay with a superbill for out-of-network reimbursement. You can book an appointment or reach out.

A final note

Missing your country is not a failure of loyalty to the life you built here. It is proof that what you left behind was worth a great deal, and that pain does not have to be carried by endurance alone.

This article is educational and is not a substitute for an evaluation by a licensed mental health professional. If you or someone close to you is in crisis, call or text 988 (press 2 for Spanish), available 24 hours a day, or call 911 if there is immediate danger.