Emigration, repatriation and mental health: adapting without losing yourself

Christopher Nolan’s recent film adaptation of The Odyssey has brought back into the public imagination one of the oldest stories about travel, loss, survival and return. Odysseus’s story can be read in many ways, but one of them is especially close to the migrant experience: someone leaves their homeland, crosses unfamiliar places, learns to adapt to codes they do not fully master, loses parts of their previous life and remains, despite everything, oriented by the idea of returning home.

Outside myth, moving country can be a deeply wanted choice, a professional opportunity, a family necessity or a way of seeking safety. It can open real possibilities: more autonomy, better economic conditions, study, love, learning, and contact with other ways of living. But even when the decision is voluntary and meaningful, the move can touch almost everything that helps a person feel oriented in the world — and that is a useful place to begin.

Emigration is not, in itself, a mental health problem. Repatriation, meaning returning to the country of origin after living abroad, is not necessarily a crisis either. But both can alter a person’s relationship with language, family, work, social status, routines and the very idea of belonging. When sadness, anxiety, irritability, loneliness, longing, insomnia or the difficult-to-explain feeling of being “between places” appear, this does not automatically mean that something is wrong with the person. Often, it means that life has changed on several levels at once — and it is precisely this layered change that the image of Odysseus helps to visualise.

Many of these reactions improve over time, especially when there is safety, connection, material stability and some continuity with one’s previous life. Still, when distress persists, limits daily life, interferes with sleep, work or relationships, or begins to push the person into isolation, it may be important to look at the experience more carefully.

In the life of someone who leaves, there is often a difficult mixture to name: the excitement of possibility, the fear of the unknown, the loss of familiar references and the hope that, somewhere along the way, it may become possible to feel at home again. That return is not always geographical. Sometimes it is a matter of rebuilding a sense of belonging after the crossing.

Monsters, disguises and Ithaca

In this crossing, the monsters rarely look like Homer’s monsters. They may appear as difficult bureaucracy, language barriers, loneliness, discrimination, longing, precarity or the feeling of constantly having to prove competence in a place where one’s previous history is not known. There is also a kind of social disguise: a person may have been recognised, competent and secure in their country of origin, but in the new context they begin almost from the start. Their accent, CV, habits and cultural references are read differently.

Ithaca, in this sense, is not only a point on a map. It is the image of a place where we hope to be recognised without explanation. But return, when it happens, is rarely simple. By the time Odysseus returns, Ithaca is no longer exactly the home he left; and he himself has also been changed by the journey. Something similar can happen in repatriation. A person returns to familiar streets, a familiar language and old relationships, but discovers that not everything fits as before. The country has changed, people have continued their lives, and the person who returns carries an experience that is not always easy to translate.

This mismatch does not mean that returning was wrong. It simply means that migration changes one’s relationship with home. For some people, returning means reconnecting with roots; for others, it means realising that belonging has come to exist in more than one place. The psychological task may be less about “finally reaching Ithaca” and more about integrating what the journey made visible: who one was, who one tried to be abroad, and who became possible after that crossing. That same crossing is worth looking at more closely — not only in its symbolic meaning, but in what changes, concretely, in everyday life.

What changes when we move country?

When someone emigrates, they do not only change address. They also change codes. The crossing continues in daily life, when what once happened almost without thinking begins to require translation, attention and energy: asking for help, understanding the humour in a conversation, explaining symptoms in another language, dealing with bureaucracy, finding housing, finding a doctor or reorganising the relationship with family at a distance. Little by little, the person discovers that adaptation does not happen only in major moments, but also in the small tasks that make a place liveable.

Adaptation is therefore not only about “willpower”. It depends on the real conditions surrounding the move: financial security, housing, legal status, employment, discrimination, language, social support, the possibility of returning and access to healthcare. The World Health Organization highlights that the mental health of refugees and migrants is shaped by factors before departure, during the transition itself and in the country of destination. These conditions also help explain why the very word used to describe a move between countries is never neutral.

Emigration, expatriation and repatriation

We use different words for experiences that often overlap. “Emigration” describes leaving the country of origin; “immigration” describes arriving in the destination country. “Expatriation” is often used for people living abroad temporarily, frequently for professional reasons, although the boundary between “migrant” and “expatriate” is not always clear.

From a psychological point of view, the label matters less than the concrete conditions of the move. A person transferred by a company, with a stable contract, family support and health insurance, faces different challenges from someone who moves alone, without a network, with precarious work or uncertain legal status. Both can suffer, but their risks and resources are not the same. The migration experience needs to be understood in its context, rather than treated as if all moves between countries were emotionally equivalent.

Repatriation deserves the same attention. Returning may seem simple to those who stayed: “you came home”. For the person returning, however, the challenge can be more ambiguous: finding a place again within home itself, explaining an experience others did not live through, dealing with old expectations or realising that some forms of autonomy gained abroad no longer exist in quite the same way. Return can bring relief, but also strangeness, comparison and a feeling of not fully belonging anywhere. This mismatch between what has been lost and what still exists, only at a distance, gives shape to what is often called migratory grief.

Migratory grief: losing without fully losing

One of the most common experiences in migration is migratory grief. It is not just missing people or places. It is a multiple and often ambiguous form of loss, because what has been lost continues to exist, but at a distance. Family, friends, food, accents, landscapes, shared humour, celebrations and the feeling of knowing “how things work” do not disappear; they remain elsewhere, accessible through messages, trips, photographs and memory, but no longer part of everyday life in the same way.

This helps explain an experience that can seem contradictory: it is possible to like the new country and still miss the previous one; to be grateful for the opportunity and suffer because of the distance; to have chosen to emigrate and still feel sadness, guilt or nostalgia. Migratory grief does not cancel the decision that was made, nor does it prove that the move was wrong. It simply shows that a meaningful life leaves traces when its shape changes.

Not losing yourself does not mean staying the same. In migratory grief, it may mean recognising that parts of one’s previous life are no longer available in the same way, without concluding that they have disappeared or stopped mattering. At the same time, it is necessary to build new routines, new belongings and new ways of recognising oneself in the place where one now lives.

Language can also be part of this reorganisation. For some people, speaking another language brings freedom, distance or reinvention; for others, it makes it harder to be spontaneous, ask for comfort or explain what they feel. Keeping the language of origin is not a sign of poor integration, just as learning the language of the host country is not a betrayal of origin. Between one language and another, many people gradually find their own way of existing without erasing their previous story.

Loneliness, social networks and daily life

Loneliness after emigration is not always about having no people around. There may be colleagues, acquaintances, neighbours, events and constant messages, and still there may be a lack of intimacy, shared history or the feeling of being understood without much explanation. Moving country also means losing the discreet relationships that supported everyday life: the person at the café, the pharmacist, the neighbour, the usual route, the extended family, the informal group that required no introduction.

A healthy network is usually plural. People from the same background can offer recognition and continuity; local relationships can support belonging, language and understanding of the system; relationships built around activities such as work, sport, volunteering, art, religion or study help identity not become reduced to “being foreign”. Building this kind of network usually takes time, and that is why it matters not to confuse slowness with failure — nor, for that matter, to confuse prolonged suffering with a simple question of time.

When adaptation becomes too heavy

Not all distress requires clinical intervention. Some transitions need time, rest, relationships and reorganisation. But it may be important to seek support when sadness, anxiety or irritability persist, when sleep deteriorates significantly, when the person becomes isolated, when they begin to feel they have failed because they are not adapting “well”, or when panic attacks, increasing alcohol or substance use, hopelessness, difficulty working or studying, or thoughts of death appear.

It is also worth being careful with comparison. Some people seem to adapt quickly, but suffer in silence; others need more time. Adaptation is not a competition, nor a test of personal worth — and this is perhaps the best starting point for thinking about what really helps, rather than what “should” help.

What can help?

Some strategies can help, as long as they remain realistic and do not become another list of duties. Naming what was lost is an important first step, because it allows longing to be recognised without turning it into guilt or weakness. Language, music, recipes, rituals, objects, dates and certain conversations can act as small points of orientation when life temporarily feels as if it has lost its map.

At the same time, adaptation needs body and repetition. Returning to the same places, creating workable schedules, getting to know the neighbourhood, finding a doctor, joining an activity or establishing small local routines can gradually make the new space feel more liveable. Belonging rarely appears as a sudden decision; it often grows from repeated experiences, from simple relationships that become regular, and from small signs of predictability.

It can also be useful to separate adaptation from assimilation. Integration does not require erasing origin, accent, values or memory. On the contrary, research on acculturation suggests that better outcomes tend to appear when a person can maintain meaningful links to their culture of origin while also participating actively in the host society. The question is not to choose a single belonging, but to find a less divided way of living between continuity and change. And it is often in therapy that this balance begins to take shape.

Therapy while abroad or after returning

Therapy can help think about the migration experience without reducing it to a diagnosis. It can be a space to understand what was lost, what was gained, what remained suspended and what version of the self is trying to emerge.

Emigration can be an expansion. Returning can be a reconstruction. Living between countries can be a legitimate form of belonging. Perhaps the question is not to return intact to the same Ithaca, because that rarely happens, but to find a habitable way of recognising the journey, the losses, the gains and the person who became possible after it.

Revised on August 25, 2026.