Homesickness and migratory grief: the losses nobody warns you about when you move abroad

Homesickness after moving abroad: what it is

Homesickness is not only for first-year students. As MIT’s health service puts it, “No matter how old you are, it’s normal to feel homesick when you are far away from home”^[5]. A large review of the research suggests defining it as a “minigrief”: “a negative emotional state primarily due to separation from home and attachment persons, characterized by longing for and preoccupation with home, and often with difficulties adjusting to the new place”^[1]. Its hallmark is “preoccupying thoughts of home and attachment objects”: the people and places you are attached to^[6].

Homesickness symptoms

Homesickness can show up in your feelings, your thoughts, how you are with people, and your body^[1]:

• Yearning and loneliness^[1]
• Thoughts that keep drifting back to home and the people there^[1][6]
• Pulling back from the people around you^[1]
• Physical symptoms: “Some people even have physical symptoms like frequent stomachaches or headaches”^[5]

It ranges “from mildly to extremely debilitating”^[1]. If you have physical symptoms such as pain, MIT advises seeing a doctor or nurse to make sure you are not actually ill^[5].

How common is it? “It is difficult to make firm statements about prevalence”, and the figures vary widely. In one study that followed expatriates over time, under 40% felt homesick after relocating; in a study of foreign employees, about 19% had serious homesickness and 30% a milder form^[1]. So if you feel it, you are far from alone, and if you do not, that is normal too.

How long does homesickness last?

There is no fixed timeline. You might expect it to fade steadily the longer you are away, but studies have not consistently found that. It can rise again around holidays, and some people stay homesick for longer^[1]. Many migrants feel distress such as sadness, anxiety or poor sleep, and the WHO notes that “for most people, these reactions improve over time”^[4].

You may see “the five stages of homesickness” online. We found no research that supports fixed stages, and studies of how homesickness changes over time do not show a neat pattern^[1].

If you are an international student

About 7 million people study outside their home country^[7]. In a small study of first-year students in the Netherlands, international students felt more homesick than Dutch students. Homesickness was highest where students were living, when they were in contact with parents, or on video calls^[8]. Across 26 studies, the stress of adapting to a new culture was linked with depression in international students^[9], and intense homesickness can make existing low mood or anxiety worse^[6]. In a review of 14 studies, structured psychoeducation programmes reduced this stress^[10]. Your university’s counselling service is a good first stop.

What is migratory grief?

The NHS says grief can be “triggered by many things and not just the death of a loved one”, and lists “moving to a new place to live” among them^[11]. In a review in the journal World Psychiatry, Bhugra and Becker write that migration involves the loss of the familiar, including language, values, social structures and support networks, and that grieving for it “can be viewed as a healthy reaction and a natural consequence of migration”^[3].

The idea has a history. In 1991, a paper on Southeast Asian refugees described “cultural bereavement”, and argued that this kind of distress can be a sign of “normal, even constructive, rehabilitation”^[12]. In 2001, a study of 150 older Chinese immigrants in the US used the term migratory grief^[13].

Grief after a death usually has rituals and a clear moment of loss. Migratory grief often has neither. Researchers describe it as partial, recurring and multiple: the country you left still exists, the feelings come back, and there are many losses at once^[14].

The research is still young. The 2024 review found only five studies, with 487 people in total, and all of them measured people at one point in time. Every one found a link between migratory grief and psychological distress^[2]. In the 2001 study, people with more migratory grief and less confidence in English were more likely to feel depressed^[13]. These are links, not proof that one causes the other.

The seven losses of migration

Spanish psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui, of the University of Barcelona, describes seven areas of loss in migration, often called the seven griefs. His main books are in Spanish, so the list below follows how peer-reviewed papers about his work describe it^[14][15]. It is his framework, not a list that all psychologists agree on.

The seven areas as described in two peer-reviewed studies of Achotegui’s work; the examples are ours^[14][15].

These losses are “partial”: people know their country of origin “continues to exist, causing ambivalence, ambiguity, and confusion”. They also recur, sometimes as fantasies of going back^[14]. The more losses pile up, the harder the grief can become^[15].

Two losses are easy to underestimate. Language is one: Bhugra and Becker single out colloquial language and dialect^[3], and in a survey of 1,310 people who moved from Hong Kong to the UK, about a third named a language barrier as a stressor. Status is the other: about 1 in 4 named a career break caused by the move^[16].

What is Ulysses syndrome?

Achotegui uses the term Ulysses syndrome for an extreme form of migratory grief: chronic, multiple stress in migrants living in very hard conditions^[14][15]. It describes people such as refugees fleeing war, violence or persecution, whose stressors “go far beyond the usual adaptation stresses to new cultures”^[17]. Achotegui developed the concept partly “to depathologize the feelings of alienation and stress after migration”^[2], though some authors do call it a disorder^[17]. It is a descriptive term, not an official diagnosis, and it is not what happens to someone whose move abroad is simply hard.

Ambiguous loss: grieving something that still exists

Family therapist Pauline Boss coined the term “ambiguous loss” for a stressor “common to families everywhere”^[18]: a loss that stays unclear and has no clear ending. One type is when someone is physically absent but psychologically present, “such as older parents separated from their children by migration”^[19]. That is how it can feel to love people in another country. They are still there, and still on your mind, but not in your daily life.

Boss argues that people facing such a loss “have not failed in the work of grieving”. Instead of closure, the goal is to “find meaning despite the lack of definitive information and finality”^[20]. She describes ambiguous loss as “not an individual pathology because the problem emerges from the outside context”, and her own ambiguous losses included immigration^[21].

Researchers have since applied her ideas to families living across borders. In a small study of Mexican workers in Minnesota and their families in Mexico, people described “feelings of chronic/recurring loss”, and made meaning by noticing how their lives had improved and their goals had been met^[22].

Culture shock, and the truth about the stages

When the journal Practical Anthropology published Kalervo Oberg’s 1960 article, it introduced culture shock as “an occupational disease of people who have been suddenly transplanted abroad”^[23]. Bhugra and Becker note that culture shock and conflict after migration “may lead to a sense of cultural confusion, feelings of alienation and isolation, and depression”^[3].

The popular idea that culture shock follows fixed stages, from a honeymoon to adjustment, has weak support. In a study that followed about 2,500 exchange students for 18 months, only about 1 in 20 (4.9%) followed that pattern, and no “honeymoon” group appeared at all^[24]. Your adjustment does not have to follow stages. For more, see culture shock: the stages, the signs and how to cope.

Is it homesickness, grief or depression?

Feeling sad, homesick or unsettled after a move is not a disorder. The WHO’s diagnostic manual is clear: “Emotional reactions to negative life events that do not meet these requirements should not be diagnosed as adjustment disorder”^[25]. Bhugra and Becker add that help may be needed “if the symptoms cause significant distress or impairment and last for a specified period of time”^[3].

Sometimes it becomes more than that. Doctors may call a lasting reaction to a stressful change, such as a move, adjustment disorder: you stay preoccupied with the change, and not being able to adapt causes “significant impairment” at home, at work, in study or socially. It usually starts within a month of the change, and the WHO notes it can be made worse when family or community support is limited^[25]. Our guide to situational depression explains it in more detail.

If there are enough signs of depression, such as low mood or loss of interest, most of the day, nearly every day, for at least 2 weeks, it counts as depression, “even if there are identifiable life events that appear to have triggered the episode”^[25]. Migratory grief is also not prolonged grief disorder, which is a diagnosis for grief after a death^[11].

Rates of depression vary a lot between groups of migrants. In a 2018 review of 25 studies, about 1 in 6 migrants (15.6%) had depression, with differences linked to education, work and how long people had lived in the new country. Newly arrived migrants seemed more vulnerable^[26]. For more, see our pages on depression and grief.

How to deal with homesickness

There is no single cure for homesickness, and a review found “just four studies actually empirically evaluating interventions”^[1]. The steps below draw on NHS advice on grief, university health services and the research we could find. Each says what kind of evidence is behind it.

Reverse culture shock when you go home

Going home can be hard too. Researchers call it re-entry stress, or reverse culture shock: people who return “often report heightened levels of stress and lower well-being… including feelings of disorientation, alienation, and depression”^[31].

In a study of 1,485 high-school students from 45 countries, returning after about a school year abroad, how they coped mattered: “acceptance coping predicted lower re-entry stress while avoidance coping predicted greater re-entry stress”. Re-entry was also harder for students returning to countries rated as more collectivist and culturally uniform^[31]. In a smaller study of 124 people who came home to Pakistan with foreign degrees, reverse culture shock was linked with more anxiety and depression, and it was not linked with how long they had been back^[32].

Research on adults returning after years abroad is thin, so treat this as a guide, not a rule. If you are planning a move back, it may help to expect some strangeness, and to accept it rather than push it away.

Why therapy in your own language matters

When homesickness or migratory grief lasts, or gets in the way of life, talking therapy can help. Here is what research says about language and culture:

• In an older review of 76 studies, therapy in clients’ own language (when it was not English) was “twice as effective” as therapy in English^[33].
• Therapy adapted to a person’s culture works somewhat better on average, across 99 studies^[34].
• Feeling understood matters: clients’ ratings of their therapist’s cultural competence were strongly linked with how well therapy went, but therapists’ ratings of themselves were not^[34].
• Simply matching client and therapist on race or ethnicity brings “almost no benefit to treatment outcomes” on average, though many people prefer it^[35].

The WHO notes that language barriers often stop migrants getting mental health care, and recommends that services “adapt interventions to account for language and culture”^[4]. So what the evidence supports is therapy in your own language, with a therapist who understands your culture and what a move abroad involves.

On Bliss Therapy

On Bliss Therapy you choose a therapist who speaks your language, by video from wherever you live, with no waitlist. 20 psychologists and counsellors list life abroad, with sessions from €40 (about £33). You can also talk to friends or family, your university’s counselling service, or a doctor where you live. In the UK, that can be your GP^[11]. If you live in Berlin or Amsterdam, see our guides to finding an English-speaking therapist in Berlin or in Amsterdam.

Our therapists are based outside the UK and the US, so they are unlikely to be on UK registers or covered by US health insurance. Ask any therapist about their training and their registration in the country where they practise.

When to get help

For most people, homesickness and migratory grief ease over time^[4]. Talk to a doctor or a therapist if:

• you have had a low mood for more than 2 weeks^[11]
• you are struggling to cope, or the things you are trying yourself are not helping^[11]
• it is getting in the way of work, study, family or social life^[25]
• you have lost interest in most things, feel hopeless, or have thoughts of death^[25]
• you are using alcohol or drugs to get through^[11]

If you are having thoughts of ending your life or harming yourself, get help now. If you live abroad, save your new country’s emergency and crisis numbers today, before you need them.