The Immigrant’s Grief Process

Abstract

Immigration has become increasingly common around the world. When an expatriate leaves their country, they also leave their family, culture, language, home, etc., that makes them go through a grief process that can be categorized as simple, complicated, or extreme. If the person is going through an extreme grief process, they may develop Ulysses Syndrome. Some factors shape how somebody experiences the process such as social and emotional vulnerability and stressors, besides issues that affect the grief such as cultural protectors, worsening’s, and subjective. This project intended to verify and map the mourning process of expats who live in Curitiba and the metropolitan area of the city experience. Method: To collect data, a social demographic survey, a half-open interview, and an adapted version of the Ulysses scale were used. Those tools were applied to 24 immigrants, from different countries. Results and debate: The most common vulnerability and stressor levels during the research were simple. As an outcome 22 of the respondents were suffering from simples mourning, while 2 of the respondents had their grief classified as complicated and none of them were classified as extreme. Final considerations: Having those results in mind it was possible to conclude that most of the immigrants who are living in Curitiba and the metropolitan area of the city are being able to cope with their grieves and the ones that are struggling more are going through worsening factors. Although some of the surveyed expatriates are experiencing extreme stressors.