Latino Population Demographics, Risk Factors, and Depression: A Case Study of the Mexican American Prevalence and Services Survey

I was raised in a Mexican immigrant household and experienced the poverty and witnessed the social discrimination and disease that accompanied it in East Los Angeles during the mid-20th century during my early childhood. These childhood and adolescent experiences were a powerful influence on my professional interests and activities throughout my life. My academic preparation at Berkeley was in sociology and criminology—I credited myself with having a good understanding of social deviance from personal observation. It was this preparation that exposed me to theory and research about immigration, social adaptation, marginality, social psychological theory, and field research methods. Although my work is interdisciplinary in scope, the template remains sociological and social psychological. My primary interest as a researcher has been two-fold, to understand the impact of immigrant adjustment on health for the total Latino population of the United States, and to improve interventions to prevent or reduce disease burden. Depression and substance use have been the focal areas of my research, and adolescents, adults, and families have been units of study. I have conducted my depression research in many settings including state mental hospitals, county mental health programs, managed behavioral health, and community epidemiologic and prevention studies in the United States and Mexico. Even after many years I continue to find depression research very interesting, and the related areas of social stress, genetics, and family research provide a wonderful opportunity for personal growth in a new era of behavioral, gene-environment, and treatment improvement research.