My Personal Struggle with Mental Health as an Immigrant in Finland: A Story of Pain and Triumph

I write this blog with a bit of fear. Opening up about your mental difficulties is not an easy thing. It means being vulnerable and allowing people to invade your privacy. You are also not sure how people will react, because having mental health issues is still seen very negatively by many people.
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However, I decided to open up, even a little bit, about what I've been going through in the past year or so. I decided to do so because I see all around me many people who are suffering, and would be supported by the knowledge that other people have also dealt with similar issues. I do it because I also feel that many people who are not in the same situations, who do not deal with similar challenging life situations and mental health issues, do not fully comprehend the gravity of these issues. Finally, I share my story because it is largely a story of triumph, of winning against these struggles, and therefore I believe it can empower many people.

So, around a year ago, in July 2023, I found myself unemployed. As I have a good education, decent experience, and good skills, I thought I would be fine. I knew that finding a job in Finland as an immigrant who does not speak Finnish fluently would be very difficult, but I braced for the challenge, and thought that if I just worked hard enough to search for a job, everything would be fine. But as time passed, I realised the situation was worse than I thought. I applied for many jobs, worked hard on my applications, and asked professionals to proofread them, but I didn't receive even one invitation for an interview. ​When I followed up on my job applications, I discovered that hundreds of others had also applied for the same positions. This was quite shocking to me, as I thought that the jobs I applied for were specialized, so not many people could apply for them.

 But it was revealed to me that the employment situation of educated immigrants in Finland is so bad, that for every professional job that doesn't require fluent Finnish, there seems to be an endless pool of applicants. In such a saturated environment, the quality of your application often matters less than sheer luck — whether something in your application happened to catch the recruiter's eye among the sea of submissions. This understanding was obviously quite depressing for me, as a person who wants to work, earn an income, build professional relationships, and feel valued.

​And then came October. Being an Israeli, the horrendous terror attack on Israel on 7.10, and the horrendous war that came after it, have all shattered me. I felt shaken and frustrated, and to a large extent alone. While I have a wife and a little child here in Finland, I don't have my Israeli family, who could more easily understand and share my feelings in this situation. Moreover, I lived in a small Finnish town at that time, where I didn't have any friends. I often felt like the only immigrant and experienced being looked at as if I were an alien. People would turn away when they saw me or even yell racist remarks, typically assuming that I am a Muslim due to my oriental appearance. All of this, along with the greying Finnish autumn, and the loneliness and frustration of unemployment, made the situation pretty depressing.

And then, in what was probably a big mistake, I listened to a Finnish psychiatrist I went to, who recommended me to stop taking a psychiatric medicine I have been taking. This medicine, which I have been taking in a very small dose since 2009, was meant to help me with the minor anxiety issue I am suffering from (like many in our society nowadays). However, as the psychiatrist thought that the medicine was not as effective as it used to be, he recommended me to stop it.

So I did, and I felt nothing special in the beginning, I didn't feel worse than I did before. But then came slowly really bad feelings. Some sharp spikes in anxiety. In sadness. Even in anger. Random crying. Feelings of losing control. I went back to that psychiatrist, who prescribed me a whole new medication, and from there everything went even worse. 

All of a sudden, I started to have severe panic attacks, something I never really suffered from before, when you feel that you completely collapse, you are heavily sweating, and can hardly breathe. These start to make you anxious not only about life situations but about the anxiety itself, terrified that another panic attack will happen. You are so deep in anxiety that life become so unbearable, so unkind, that you even have suicidal thoughts. In the worst moment, probably the worst moment in my life so far, I found myself lying in bed in a hotel I went to with my wife and child, completely terrified, completely dysfunctional, too scared to travel back home, too scared to take care of my own child. The lowest of the lowest.

​But from the lowest point, one can only go up. Shortly after this low point, I went to a new psychiatrist, who told me that the medication that was prescribed to me by the previous psychiatrist is intended for treating other disorders and not my original problem of anxiety. And not only that, increased anxiety and panic attacks are very common side effects of the medication prescribed to me by the previous psychiatrist, which largely explains much of what I have been going through.  

Thus, this new psychiatrist prescribed me another anti-anxiety medicine (still at a low dose), and things were starting to improve, even a little bit. It should be noted, however, that I met all these psychiatrists privately, because I was told in the public health centers that their psychiatrists are too overloaded to meet with clients. So I had to pay several hundreds of euros for each meeting with a psychiatrist, not easy when you are unemployed, but crucial to save my life.

And then, in what I can only define as good fortune, I was called by Familia, where I was previously in a work tryout and also applied for a job earlier (which I did not originally get). In the call, Familia’s executive director informed me that they want to hire me, for a fixed-term position I applied for earlier. While I was obviously excited about the job opportunity, I was also a bit scared, about whether I would be able to function well after everything I went through. But I decided to go for it, having still some belief in myself, and also believing that having a job would occupy me and will help me regain my sense of self-worth.

And I was right. For half a year now, since I started the work in December, I didn't have a single panic attack. Moreover, I was functioning well, felt like a human again, and got excellent feedback from my team.

Recently, I even got some indication that Familia would like to continue my work also on the long-term, on a permanent contract, as a result of my excellent functioning and integration into the workplace. This is amazing, unimaginable considering where I was half a year ago. It is a good reminder that no matter how dark things look, the light at the end of the tunnel is still there, closer than you think. And it is also a reminder of how much having a job can be valuable for a person's well-being, in terms of providing a meaningful occupation, a sense of self-worth, and belonging to some kind of community. Conversely, the unemployment of so many people, particularly immigrants in this country, makes them not only devoid of livelihood in the material sense of it, but also shatters their lives, depriving them of a sense of self-worth and of integration into society. Finally, this story is also a reminder for people not to take their mental health lightly, not to make hasty decisions about psychiatric medications, to fight to receive a good mental health treatment, and to always get a second opinion about major medical decisions. 

In light of this, in my last words in this blog, I want to appeal to the decision-makers, if only for the small chance that even just one of them reads this:
Address properly the issues of mental health in our society. Provide people with the sufficient support they need. Reduce bureaucracy and other obstacles for them to receive it. Work also harder to improve the receptiveness of Finnish society to immigrant workers, not only in "blue collar" jobs but also in specialized jobs. This is not only a matter of numbers, of a bit less or more debt in the budget, it is a matter of people's lives.

Written by: Ran Blumgrund