Being a third culture child is brilliant, you get to see the world, take cool pictures and probably speak a few different languages. However, there are so many negatives that come with living this lifestyle and this blog post will be discussing the many problems that come with being a Third culture child, focusing on mental health issue that might arise from this lifestyle

Waking up to that feeling of helplessness, tiredness and sadness. Is this depression you ask yourself. Depression is something that many people suffer from, people who don’t suffer from it can’t understand and is not strictly a 100% curable. The  Mayo clinic website described depression, as “Depression is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. Also called major depressive disorder or clinical depression, it affects how you feel, think and behave and can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems.”

Depression is a huge problem in general, according to the World Health Organization website more than 350 million people suffer from depression, that’s the reported number of people who suffer depression. That’s an immense amount of people suffering from depression. Many authors of books written about TCK’s have said that it is not depression but unresolved grief. The authors Pollock and Van Reken in their book Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, talk about the different stages of unresolved in TCK’s which are similar to how normal individuals react to grief such as: Anger, Sadness/depression, delayed grief, rebellion, denial, withdrawal, vicarious grief. In the book they go into detail, using examples of individuals that have told their stories. However, in that chapter of the book they do not highlight how this is different from other individuals who have never left their home culture and do not give a figure of the percentage of individuals who are TCK and suffer from this. 18% of the American population aged 18 and up suffer from an anxiety disorder. As Professor Read discussed today in class, I believe that the authors have committed a theory that is a false positive. They cannot definitively say that TCK’s suffer from grief due to the change in culture, environment and bad adjusting. A better study is on  which does not use the world delayed grief but the term depression, then the author goes on to say that it is more prominent among TCK individuals however, does not imply many or all TCK suffer from mental health problems.

I couldn’t find more substantial studies to go into depth about TCK. What I have found that I agree with, being a TCK myself is the feeling of not belonging to any particular culture; being a “Global normed” as coined by Norma McCaig, which can be very lonely and often effects how I look at things and relate to people in an unusual way and hardly settle in one place. I believe that the reason why there are very little studies done on TCK’s because emotions are very subjective and getting people to talk about vulnerabilities is hard.