There is a mental health crisis among refugees – here’s how we can help fix it

We must be a voice for all those displaced, by funding and enabling effective support to bring light to those in darkness, writes Eleanor Monbiot

Being displaced is already a vicious cycle of fear, hopelessness and depression (Getty)

When you lose your home as a refugee, you lose everything. The outlook is immediately bleak: most displaced families are not able to afford food to meet their daily nutrition needs; a quarter are keeping children out of school due to the economic hardship they face; a fifth are sending children to work and, in places like Afghanistan and Niger, significant numbers are resorting to child marriage.

These very concrete symptoms of displacement are startling, but what is even more heartbreaking is that there is another growing crisis for the world’s refugees and displaced people – symptoms which are harder to see. The mental health toll of losing it all.

Globally, mental health is gradually being met with more empathy and action, but progress is far from equal. Across the Middle East, which is the source of 54 per cent of the world’s refugees, discrimination, denial, ignorance and stigma of mental health issues are still the norm.