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World Mental Health Day: Why Mental Health Matters for Refugee Self-Reliance

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World Mental Health Day: Why Mental Health Matters for Refugee Self-Reliance

By Shelby Quackenbush (Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative), Sofia Casas and Peter Ventevogel (UNHCR), and Anna Nicol (RefugePoint), on behalf of the full team of White Paper authors, including Awa Ahmed Haji Omar (UNHCR), Sonasha Braxton and Simar Singh (RefugePoint), and Alli Gillespie (Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative).

On World Mental Health Day, we are reminded that mental health is essential to people’s ability to navigate challenges, contribute to their communities, and shape their futures. For refugees experiencing prolonged displacement, it is also closely connected to their ability to achieve and sustain self-reliance, and yet the two are rarely addressed in tandem. Most refugees face years of displacement as durable solutions remain out of reach.

As humanitarian needs continue to grow and resources become increasingly stretched, understanding the relationship between mental health and self-reliance has never been more urgent.

A new White Paper on The Interdependence of Mental Health and Self-Reliance in Forced Displacement Settings by RefugePoint, UNHCR, and the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI) examines the evidence behind this relationship and identifies key implications for policy and programming.

Self-reliance and mental health reinforce each other

Refugees experiencing financial insecurity, unemployment, inadequate housing, social exclusion, and prolonged uncertainty may face increased risks of psychological distress. At the same time, mental health conditions can affect attention, decision-making, social relationships, and the ability to pursue employment and other opportunities. Together, these dynamics can reinforce cycles of poverty and dependence.

While self-reliance is often measured through income, employment, or reduced reliance on humanitarian assistance, it is shaped by a broader set of factors, including legal status, access to services, safety, social connections, and psychological well-being. Mental health is an important part of this picture, influencing people’s ability to pursue opportunities, build relationships, and sustain livelihoods.

Evidence from multiple countries, including Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, and Iraq, shows promising results from interventions that address mental health alongside livelihoods and economic inclusion, including approaches that strengthen future orientation, agency, and social connectedness.

The relationship also works in the opposite direction. Decent work and greater economic and social inclusion can provide not only income, but also purpose, routine, agency, and stronger social networks, all of which can contribute to improved psychosocial well-being.

From parallel programming to integrated approaches and policy

Despite this interdependence, actors working on mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) and those working on self-reliance often work separately. Bringing these agendas closer together can make programmes more responsive to the realities refugees face and help ensure that limited resources achieve greater and more sustainable impact.

For self-reliance practitioners, this can mean incorporating MHPSS considerations and referral pathways into livelihoods and economic inclusion programmes. It can also mean looking beyond income metrics alone and using multidimensional approaches to understand what contributes to sustained self-reliance.

For MHPSS practitioners, this can mean considering the broader factors that shape people’s ability to participate in economic and social life. Strengthening agency, confidence, and social connectedness can be important pathways through which mental health interventions contribute to self-reliance.

Policymakers also play a critical role. The conditions that influence both mental health and opportunities for self-reliance are often shaped by laws, policies, and public services. Addressing structural barriers, including access to healthcare, education, employment, and social protection, is essential to enabling refugees to rebuild their lives with dignity and exercise greater agency over their futures.

Researchers can help deepen understanding of what works, for whom, and in which contexts. More evidence is needed on how integrated approaches can be delivered effectively and sustainably, particularly whether improvements in both well-being and economic outcomes are maintained over time.

Centring agency, community, and lived experience

Bringing mental health and self-reliance together also means building on the strengths that already exist within refugee communities. Refugee-led organizations (RLOs), peer-support groups, faith communities, and other community networks play an important role in fostering social connection, psychosocial well-being, and pathways to self-reliance.

The White Paper calls for greater investment in these community-based approaches and greater recognition of practice-based and community-generated evidence. Refugees are not simply recipients of assistance; they are active agents in shaping their own futures and supporting their communities.

Putting the evidence into practice

On this World Mental Health Day, our key takeaway is clear: mental health and self-reliance must be brought closer together across policy and programming. This requires strengthening community-based and refugee-led approaches and measuring progress across the multiple dimensions of people’s lives.

While there is still much to learn about what works, for whom, and in which contexts, the evidence increasingly shows us that mental health should not be treated as an add-on to self-reliance efforts. It must be integrated at the core of self-reliance programming and policy. Doing so is a practical necessity for using limited humanitarian resources effectively and efficiently and, perhaps most importantly, is simply the right thing to do to “leave no one behind.”

Read the White Paper