By Laura L. Acosta
UTEP News Service
Growing up in South America, Mark Lusk, Ed.D., lived in countries run by fascist governments and civil war. Lusk’s father was a U.S. diplomat and as a child, Lusk was shielded from many of the struggles that people who lived in Asuncion, Paraguay and Bogota, Colombia faced under such regimes.
But his ability to speak Spanish fluently allowed Lusk to interact with the world around him and flamed his interest in social justice.
“I grew up in Colombia when the civil war and drug wars went on there,” said Lusk, professor and chair of UTEP’s Department of Social Work. “When you’re the son of a diplomat, you sort of live in a bubble until you’re out and about talking to people.”
Lusk is the recipient of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rio Grande Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, and he has devoted his 36-year career as a social worker, academic and researcher to trying to understand how societies in Latin American countries such as Mexico can function in a state of conflict.
Lusk, along with Griselda Villalobos, Ph.D., assistant professor of social work, recently completed a study on depression and trauma suffered by refugees who have fled the violence in Northern Mexico and settled in the United States.
Since 2010, Lusk and Villalobos have interviewed 24 adults who fled Mexico because their lives had been permeated by extortion, rape, kidnapping and murder as a result of the drug-related violence in Juárez and throughout the country.
The Mexican government estimates that nearly 48,000 people have been killed in suspected drug-related violence in Mexico during the past five years. According to the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 200,000 people have left Juárez, since the start of the drug war.
“All of this is the backdrop against which a social worker such as myself would look and say, ‘I see here immense human suffering,’” said Lusk, the study’s principal investigator. “I’m not coming at it as a political scientist or as a person who’s attempting to understand the national politics of Mexico, but I’m coming to it as a social worker who’s seeing a city that has been decimated by violence, and a country that’s been decimated by violence, and I look at that entirely in human terms.”
Lusk and Villalobos worked with Catholic Counselling Services, Family Services of El Paso, and Las Americas Immigration Advocacy Agency to identify people in El Paso who experienced a traumatic event that forced them to leave their homes, friends, families and livelihoods in Mexico.
“These people had been kidnapped or they had had their businesses burned down or they had members of their families murdered,” Lusk said.
Participation was 100 percent voluntary and there were few who declined to take part in the study, said Richard Salcido, executive director of Family Services of El Paso, who saw his organization’s involvement as an opportunity to help the community.
“There is always hope that these types of studies will lead to better treatment services for those who have suffered the atrocities being perpetrated in Juárez,” Salcido said.
Participants never revealed their names and instead were identified by a number.
They answered questions from the Beck’s Depression Inventory, a test that helped Lusk and Villalobos measure the severity of clinical depression that people suffered as a result of losing their home, their country, and contact with extended friendships and family. They also administered the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire that was developed by psychologists at Harvard to examine trauma among refugees and individuals who had been displaced by war or genocide, Lusk said.
The hour-and-a-half-long interview allowed Lusk and Villalobos to get some insight into what factors influenced a person’s decision to pick up and leave their country for a life that many described as “living in the shadows,” because they are afraid of retaliation or deportation.
Researchers found that the majority of individuals suffered from clinical depression and anxiety associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but they were surprised to see that most of the participants showed great resiliency and were bouncing back from their depression in as little as six months.
“We thought that we were going to find a lot of people who are very depressed or living in the shadows, and what we had found is very much the opposite in that it is almost like they had to readapt to a new world and they’re just doing the best they can with it,” Villalobos said. “It’s been very inspirational.”
Lusk attributes this adaptation to the U.S. not only to the mental health services that are available to these individuals, but also to the resilient and protective factors associated with their culture that include family, faith, friendships, networks of people, and the ability to blend in with the population.
Another surprising revelation was that participants did not hold a great deal of anger toward the perpetrators who had hurt them, but instead they were angrier by the absences of law and order in their home city.
Lusk and Villalobos presented the study’s findings at the “Trauma through the Life Cycle from a Strengths-Based Perspective” conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in January. Theirs was the only paper that was presented on refugees who were not fleeing a country because of ethnic, political or religious persecution.
Lusk is not a newcomer to refugee studies. He has conducted studies on street children in Brazil and Juárez and examined the plight of refugees in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Bosnia.
He said that unlike economic migrants who typically return to Mexico after working for a period of time in the U.S., this type of migration from Mexico to the U.S. has nothing to do with the desire to come to the U.S. to make money to send back home. Instead these refugees are fleeing their country because in their mind, there is no other way to survive.
Lusk joined UTEP in July 2007. He served as associate dean for the College of Health Sciences from 2008 to 2011. In 2010, Lusk helped launch the University’s Master of Social Work (MSW) program, which prepares students to address the social and health needs of families and communities in a bi-national, bi-cultural region.
“I can’t think of anything more important for a social worker to do than to study ways in which we could advance the cause of human wellbeing in the face of suffering, such as we see in countries like Mexico,” Lusk said. “It’s our obligation professionally and it’s my obligation morally to spend my adult life working on these sorts of questions.”