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. 2025 Oct;12(5):3240-3252.
doi: 10.1007/s40615-024-02128-4. Epub 2024 Aug 20.

Discrimination and Racial Inequities in Self-reported Mental Health Among Immigrants and Canadian-Born Individuals in a Large, Nationally Representative Canadian Survey

Kathleen S Kenny  1 , Susitha Wanigaratne  2   3 , Lisa Merry  4   5 , Arjumand Siddiqi  6   7   8 , Marcelo L Urquia  9
Affiliations

Discrimination and Racial Inequities in Self-reported Mental Health Among Immigrants and Canadian-Born Individuals in a Large, Nationally Representative Canadian Survey

Kathleen S Kenny et al. J Racial Ethn Health Disparities. 2025 Oct.

Abstract

We examined the link between discrimination and self-rated mental health (SRMH) among immigrants and Canadian-born individuals, stratified according to an individual's identification as racialized or white. Using data from Canada's General Social Survey (2014) (weighted N = 27,575,000) with a novel oversample of immigrants, we estimated the association of perceived discrimination with SRMH separately among immigrants and Canadian-born individuals and stratified by racialized status. Among immigrants, we also investigated whether age-at-arrival attenuated or strengthened associations. The prevalence of discrimination was higher among racialized compared to white immigrants (18.9% versus 11.8%), and among racialized compared to white non-immigrants (20.0% versus 10.5%). In the adjusted model with immigrants, where white immigrants not reporting discrimination were the referent group, both white (adjusted prevalence odds ratio [aPOR] 6.11, 95% confidence interval [CI] 3.08, 12.12) and racialized immigrants (aPOR 2.28, 95% CI 1.29, 4.04) who experienced discrimination reported poorer SRMH. The associations were weaker among immigrants who immigrated in adulthood. In the adjusted model with non-immigrants, compared to unexposed white respondents, Canadian-born white respondents who experienced discrimination reported poorer SRMH (aPOR 3.62, 95% CI 2.99, 4.40) while no statistically significant association was detected among racialized respondents (aPOR 2.24, 95% CI 0.90, 5.58). Racialized respondents experienced significant levels of discrimination compared to white respondents irrespective of immigrant status. Discrimination was associated with poor SRMH among all immigrants, with some evidence of a stronger association for white immigrants and immigrants who migrated at a younger age. For Canadian-born individuals, discrimination was associated with poor SRMH among white respondents only.

Keywords: Canada; Discrimination; Health inequities; Immigrant health; Immigrants; Race; Racism.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics Approval: The study obtained ethics approval from the Research Ethics Board at the University of Manitoba (Protocol reference: H2018:438 (HS22337)) on January 9, 2019. Consent to Participate: Consent to participate does not apply to this study because it relied exclusively on secondary use of anonymous information legally accessible to the public through Statistics Canada’s Research Data Centres (RDCs), which are located throughout the country. RDCs provide researchers with access, in a secure setting, to microdata from the General Social Survey, 2014 and other population and household surveys. The centres are staffed by Statistics Canada employees. They are operated under the provisions of the Statistics Act in accordance with all the confidentiality rules and are accessible only to researchers with approved projects, such as ours, who have been sworn in under the Statistics Act as ‘deemed employees’. Consent to Publish: Consent to publish is not applicable to our study. No individual person’s data have been included in our manuscript and minimum cell size requirements and rounding required by Statistics Canada are imposed to minimize the risk of breach of confidentiality. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests to disclose.

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