Children who have been detained in overcrowded, squalid migrant camps at the border aren’t just facing poor living conditions. They also are at higher risks of serious mental health problems, some of which could be irreparable, Axios reports. Children are fleeing life-or-death situations in their home countries. Instead of healing their psychological and emotional trauma, federal officials are exacerbating the damage through means that the medical community views as flagrant violations of medical ethics. Studies show that people who seek asylum and are detained in immigration camps, especially children, suffer severe mental health consequences. Those include detachment, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which put them at higher risk for committing suicide.
The conditions in U.S. detention centers — sleeping on concrete floors, a lack of basic necessities, unsanitary cage holdings and family separations — compound the trauma of migrant children who have witnessed violence and death back home and have endured arduous journeys to escape, say pediatricians, child psychiatrists, medical ethicists and researchers. Marsha Griffin, a pediatrician in Texas, visited the Ursula detention center in June with colleagues from the American Academy of Pediatrics. She recalled a young boy in a cage crying because his father had been taken to court and he had lost his aunt’s phone number. Another child relinquished his space blanket, saying it led to nightmares. “This is child abuse and medical neglect,” Griffin said. Rachel Ritvo, a child psychiatrist, says, “The children who are separated — I’m speechless. That was what was done in slavery. That’s what was done in the Holocaust.” Ritvo and more than 800 other doctors and bioethicists have signed a public letter that condemned the conditions “where the physical and mental health of detainees are being placed at extreme risk.”