Mental Health Awareness Week 2026:Awareness Must Become Action

Content note: This article discusses suicide, trauma, asylum refusal, and mental health distress.

Mental Health Awareness Week takes place from 11 to 17 May 2026. This year’s theme, led by the Mental Health Foundation, is Action. It speaks directly to the heart of our work at the Sisters Not Strangers Coalition.

For us, mental health is not an abstract issue. It is not only about individual wellbeing, self-care, or encouraging people to talk. These things matter, but for women seeking asylum, mental health is also shaped by the systems they are forced to live within.

It is shaped by unsafe accommodation.

It is shaped by isolation.

It is shaped by poverty and enforced dependency.

It is shaped by long delays, uncertainty, fear, racism, and the constant pressure of having to prove your pain in order to be believed.

At Sisters Not Strangers, we work alongside women who have survived war, persecution, gender-based violence, trafficking, displacement, family separation, and many other forms of trauma. Many come to the UK hoping to find safety. Yet too often, the asylum system continues to expose women to new forms of harm.

This is why our Right to Heal campaign exists.

We believe that women seeking asylum have the right not only to survive, but to heal. Healing cannot happen when women are left in unsuitable accommodation, moved from place to place without warning, separated from support networks, or left without proper mental health care. Healing cannot happen when women are made to feel invisible, powerless, or unsafe within the very system that is supposed to protect them.

Mental Health Awareness Week calls for action. At Sisters Not Strangers, we believe that action must begin by listening to women with lived experience.

Women in our coalition have told us again and again that mental health support is often too difficult to access, too slow to arrive, or not designed around the realities of women seeking asylum. Many face language barriers, cultural barriers, digital exclusion, fear of authorities, and a lack of trust in services. Some live with deep trauma while also worrying about food, housing, legal cases, children, family left behind, and the daily uncertainty of the asylum process.

These pressures are not small. They are not temporary. They can become unbearable.

Access to Legal Support and Mental Health

Another issue that cannot be separated from mental health is the lack of access to legal support. Many women seeking asylum struggle to find legal aid solicitors for their claims or appeals. When legal aid is unavailable, women are often pushed towards private legal firms, but this is an impossible option for those banned from working and forced to survive on minimal asylum support.

This creates a cruel situation. A woman may have only days to appeal a refusal, but no legal representative, no money for private help, and no clear understanding of what to do next. The stress can be overwhelming.

Through our work, we have seen women arrive in tears, confused, frightened, and deeply disappointed. One woman came to us after her asylum claim was refused and she was given 14 days to appeal. She had no legal representative and no money to instruct a private solicitor.

The pressure was written on her body. She was distressed, crying, and trying desperately to understand what to do before her appeal deadline passed. What we saw was not simply legal confusion. It was a woman pushed into crisis by a system that gave her a refusal, a deadline, no solicitor, no income to secure private legal support, and no realistic route to safety.

The refusal did not only affect her legal case. It reopened the trauma of her whole journey, including the detention and violence she had endured on the way to the UK. She spoke about the painful gap between the dream of safety many people associate with the UK and the harsh reality she was facing.

Access to justice must be part of any serious mental health response for people seeking asylum.

Safety and Accountability

Across the UK, serious concerns have been raised about the wellbeing and safety of people living in Home Office accommodation. In Sheffield, the recent death of a young woman seeking asylum raised painful questions about safeguarding, isolation, and the level of mental health support available in asylum housing.

We cannot speak about mental health honestly if we do not speak about the conditions that push people into crisis.

How many more lives must be lost before mental health is treated as a safeguarding issue within the asylum system? How many warnings must be ignored before we accept that this is not only about individual vulnerability, but about structural failure?

For women seeking asylum, mental health is deeply connected to dignity. It is about whether they feel safe in their room. Whether they can sleep at night. Whether they can see a GP and talk openly. Whether someone notices when they stop attending activities. Whether they can afford to travel to an appointment. Whether they can speak in their own language. Whether they are believed when they say they are not coping.

These are not luxuries. They are basic conditions for life, safety, and recovery.

The Role of Community and Its Limits

As a women-led coalition, Sisters Not Strangers knows the power of community. We have seen women support each other through food, friendship, translation, childcare, advocacy, campaigning, and simple acts of care. We have seen women who were once isolated become leaders, speakers, organisers, and campaigners for change.

But community support cannot be used as an excuse for government inaction.

Grassroots organisations and refugee women’s groups are doing vital work, often with limited resources and under enormous pressure. They are trusted by women because they are close to their lives and realities. But they cannot replace proper safeguarding, safe accommodation, specialist mental health services, access to justice, and accountability from those with statutory responsibility.

Our Calls to Action

This Mental Health Awareness Week, we are calling for action that matches the seriousness of the crisis.

Through our Right to Heal campaign and our work with women seeking asylum across the UK, Sisters Not Strangers calls for:

• Urgent action to address the mental health crisis affecting women seeking asylum who are living in unsafe, isolating, or unsuitable accommodation

• Trauma-informed and culturally sensitive mental health support that is accessible, consistent, and designed around women’s realities

• Safe housing, safeguarding protections, and early intervention systems that prevent women from being left unsupported in moments of crisis

• Greater accountability from the Home Office and accommodation providers for the wellbeing and safety of residents

• Urgent action to address the shortage of legal aid, especially for women facing refusal, appeal deadlines, detention risks, or complex trauma

• Recognition that legal insecurity, poverty, and the ban on working are major causes of stress, anxiety, depression, and crisis among women seeking asylum

• Stronger collaboration between grassroots groups, local authorities, health services, legal advice providers, and refugee-led communities, so women do not fall through support gaps

• Proper recognition and investment in women-led, refugee-led, and community-based organisations as part of any serious mental health response

• An asylum system built on dignity, healing, safety, justice, and human rights, not prolonged uncertainty, isolation, and harm

  
  

We also call for greater transparency around deaths and suspected suicides among people seeking asylum. Without proper recording, learning, and accountability, the same failures risk being repeated. Every life lost should matter. Every warning sign should be taken seriously. Every woman should be seen as a human being, not a case number.

Awareness Must Lead to Change

Mental health awareness must not become a comfortable annual message while harmful systems continue unchanged.

Awareness must mean asking difficult questions.

Awareness must mean listening to women living through the asylum system now.

Awareness must mean challenging policies and practices that create distress.

Awareness must mean investing in care, safety, legal support, and prevention before women reach crisis point.

For Sisters Not Strangers, action means building an asylum system where women are safe enough to breathe, supported enough to heal, and respected enough to rebuild their lives with dignity.

This Mental Health Awareness Week, we remember the women whose pain was not seen in time. We stand with those still waiting for safety, justice, and support. And we continue to say clearly: seeking asylum should never cost someone their mental health, their dignity, or their life.

Mental health is a human rights issue.

Healing is a justice issue.

Access to justice is a mental health issue.

And action is long overdue.