The Ulysses Syndrome: The Seven Griefs of Migration

Joseba Achotegui called it the Ulysses Syndrome — the immigrant syndrome of chronic and multiple stress. He didn't choose the name lightly. Watching the desperation, danger and prolonged solitude faced by migrants arriving in Europe, he found himself returning to Homer: people crossing borders today were living episodes as dramatic as those described in the Odyssey nearly three thousand years earlier.

Ulysses was a demigod who barely survived the adversities he faced. The people arriving at borders today are flesh-and-blood human beings — facing trials just as severe, without the protection of the gods.

Migration as grief, not just change

Achotegui's theory rests on a distinction most of us don't make instinctively: migrating isn't simply stressful, the way a big move or a new job is stressful. It's a form of grief — the reorganisation a person goes through after losing something significant.

Stress, in his framing, is a substantial imbalance between the demands a person perceives and their capacity to respond. Grief is the process of personality reorganisation that occurs when something significant is lost. Seen this way, migration asks a person to mourn and rebuild at the same time — often while still learning the language needed to ask for help.

The seven griefs of migration

Achotegui identified seven distinct losses that make up this migratory grief:

1. Family and loved ones — the people left behind, and the relationships that now continue at a distance.
2. Language — not just vocabulary, but the ability to fully express who you are.
3. Culture — the codes, humour and unspoken rules that used to be second nature.
4. Land — the physical place, the landscape, the sense of home.
5. Social status — the professional standing and role built over years, sometimes erased overnight.
6. Group belonging — the community that once knew your history.
7. Physical safety — the security that a difficult journey or an unstable new environment can take away.

These seven griefs — family, language, culture, land, social status, group belonging and physical safety — occur to some degree in every migration.

Why it isn't always the same experience

Crucially, Achotegui doesn't argue that every migrant suffers equally. He distinguishes between a simple grief — one lived with enough resources, time and support to process it well — and an extreme one, where several of these losses arrive at once, under pressure, without a network to soften the blow.

It's this second version — chronic, multiple, unsupported — that tips into the Ulysses Syndrome itself: a state at the border between ordinary stress and diagnosable illness, marked by anxious and depressive symptoms and, physically, by one of its most common signs — tension headaches, present in the large majority of documented cases.

What this means, practically

Achotegui has been careful to frame this as neither pathology nor weakness — it's a proportionate human response to disproportionate circumstances. But he's also been clear that the right support matters: caught early, many of these seven griefs can be processed in healthy ways. Left alone, under chronic pressure, they compound.

This is the space Odisea was built for. Not clinical treatment — the Ulysses Syndrome sits at the edge of mental-health care, and that's a professional's role, not ours. But something upstream of crisis: places where the loss of language, status, community and belonging can be named, shared and gently rebuilt, before chronic stress becomes something heavier.

If migration asks someone to mourn seven things at once, the least a community can offer is somewhere to put a few of them down.

Further reading

• Achotegui, J. — El Síndrome de Ulises. Contra la deshumanización de la migración (Ediciones Ned).
• Achotegui, J. (2000) — Los duelos de la migración: una perspectiva psicopatológica y psicosocial.

Sources: Fundació Orienta · GESI · Joseba Achotegui · Temas de Psicoanálisis