The American Psychoanalytic Association honors Chicago Health and El Tiempo Latino for reporting on Venezuelan migrant children’s mental health
The American Psychoanalytic Association has awarded Chicago Health’s “After the Darién” a Special Recognition Award. The two-part series, produced in partnership with El Tiempo Latino, explores the mental health journey that Venezuelan migrant children face after traveling to the United States.
The association’s award panel calls the work “a hard-hitting exposé on one of the most disturbing and destructive issues of our times, poignantly told through the stories of families directly affected.”
Reporters Clavel Rangel and Katie Scarlett Brandt tell the story of thousands of families, uprooted from their homeland, now struggling to build new lives and opportunities. Schools, community members, and human rights organizations have played a crucial role in addressing their mental health needs and integration. Yet, as these families face ongoing hardships, the strength of those support systems is tested every day.
For “After the Darién,” Rangel and Brandt spent a year talking with more than three dozen social workers, psychologists, teachers, frontline organizers, and forcibly-displaced migrant families. They analyzed statistical data to understand how mental health needs are being addressed and spoke with families to learn their journeys, internal and external.
In March, Rangel and Brandt presented in Toronto to the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration, members of the United Nations, and immigration researchers about their approach to researching and reporting this project, as well as what they learned from the work.
“The sections on mental health issues are powerful and important,” the American Psychoanalytic Association award panelists wrote, noting the work’s engagement with questions around “whether someone can successfully integrate into a new society if they haven’t integrated their trauma into their own being. The multiple complex factors involved in the larger clusters of social and socio-political problems are fastidiously researched and unflinchingly examined.”
The project also “beautifully leverages the digital format, melding the scrolling text with extraordinary images and graphics to create an immersive documentary-film-style-like experience in print for readers,” award panelists wrote.
“This recognition is very special to us because our project was carried out independently, with the support of various funds that made it possible,” Rangel says, adding that the work sheds light on families who fled Venezuela and arrived in the United States in an uncertain context. “Today, those families are being re-victimized by ICE enforcement in several cities, and by the frequent impossibility of returning to their country of origin, where they were persecuted,” Rangel says.
“After the Darién” was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Lauren Brown Fellowship, and the Investigative Reporters and Editors. Peniley Ramírez of Futuro Media Group and Kate Howard of Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting provided investigative guidance. Explore the series in full here.
