Researcher studies mental health in Guatemala

When Victor Polanco first arrived at Penn last July, it was his first time ever leaving Guatemala. Now almost a year later, he is ready to return — bringing with him a plan to help combat mental health issues in his country.

Polanco was the first researcher to arrive at Penn as part of a collaborative program between the Penn Epidemiology Program and researchers from Guatemala which aims to address chronic health issues in the developing country.

For phase one of the program, Polanco has spent the past year at Penn taking courses in the master’s in clinical epidemiology program at Penn. For Polanco, his experience at Penn has been “completely different” from his life in Guatemala. From the professional standpoint, he has been learning things he “never dreamed of before.”

“The kind of training that you receive here is really great — they make you think like an epidemiologist” Polanco explained. “Here, you’re like really up to date and don’t have to wait until the version in Spanish comes out into the market. In Guatemala, you have to wait one or two years, and it’s not a good thing.”

In July, Polanco will return to Guatemala to complete the second part of the master’s program — implementing his final research project on the mental health effects of violence.

Because of Guatemala’s history of violence, Polanco’s project focuses on “violence exposure and its relationship to mental health outcomes.” He explained that he is mostly interested in looking at exposure to “everyday violence.” Though homicides and drug trafficking may not seem like “everyday violence … we have it in Guatemala,” Polanco said.

Guatemala had a 36-year war — from 1960 to 1996 — during which about 200,000 lives were lost and more than one million people were internally and externally displaced from their homes. Because of this, people adapted to that level of violence as the “normal thing,” explained Polanco.

By asking questions about experience with direct combat and being threatened by a gun, Polanco hopes to determine whether violence has negative mental health outcomes like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or anxiety.

For his medical school thesis project, Polanco helped conduct the first national mental health survey in Guatemala. The survey found that around 27.8 percent of the population between ages 18 and 65 years had mental health problems — with post-traumatic stress disorder the most common. Polanco explained that a lot of people including the Ministry of Health were “really interested” in the survey. However, “the database is there, and nobody has used it.”

“This is how the idea was born to do this project right now,” Polanco said. This past survey was “descriptive” rather than “analytic” — so for his upcoming project, Polanco hopes to make a stronger association between this exposure to violence and these selected mental health outcomes.

“People are tired of being exposed to this difficult situation of violence that you see everyday in the newspaper,” Polanco said. “So I think it’s good to start to give them a different kind of news where people can be proud and say this country is not that bad — we can do things.”

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