Tibetan students in Dharamsala. File picture

New Delhi, April 19: Young ethnic Tibetans living in exile show high rates of anxiety and depression, possibly an emotional price for the loss of a homeland, researchers have said.

The researchers from Emory University School of Medicine in the US evaluated some 300 Tibetan children from two schools in Himachal Pradesh and found unusually high anxiety and depression levels among children born and raised in exile and those born in Tibet.

The study of the students from Tibetan Children’s Villages at Upper Dharamsala and Bir has shown that students born in Tibet had significantly higher depression and anxiety scores than Tibetans who were born in exile — either in India or Nepal.

The anxiety and depression could lead to symptoms such as difficulty in achieving happiness, in concentration and oppositional behaviour, said Charles Raison, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Emory and the study investigator.

“Sometimes people who have never seen a homeland feel more strongly about it than people who have been there,” Raison said. “Trauma gets passed on in families and cultures,” he said.

The personal history of the students and the patterns of symptoms indicate that experiences in Tibet promoted depression while time spent in India may have promoted an improvement of symptoms, the researchers said in a study published this month in the Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

The findings revealed that the longer the children had stayed in India, the less was their anxiety and depression scores. This, Raison said, could be interpreted in two ways — the environment in India is soothing or anxiety levels after a move to a new country steadily drop as time goes by.

“But even Tibetans born and raised in exile in India appear to be paying an emotional price for the loss of their homeland,” Raison said.

He and his colleagues conducted the study in 2002 — long before the crisis erupted in Tibet this year. They evaluated students from Classes VII to XII, studying in schools run for the Tibetan children.

A school administrator said she wasn’t surprised by the findings. “Emotional stress is not always visible, but we sense undercurrents,” said Sonam Dolkar, principal of the Tibetan Children’s School at Upper Dharamsala, which has about 2,000 students from KG to Class XII. “We have young children who’ve left relatives and parents behind in Tibet. There is a level of anxiety always,” Dolkar said.

One-third of the refugees are children and 90 per cent of them come without parents, Raison said.

“Not only have these children been victimised in an environment lacking respect for human rights, but their escape from Tibet to India through the perilous Himalayas is full of trauma,” he said.