Mental Health Care for Migrant Children

The Challenge

Displacement, violence, and separation from loved ones leave Pakistani Hindu migrant children at heightened risk of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress. Layered on top are the everyday pressures of acculturation, language barriers, and limited access to any kind of mental health support in the settlements where these families live.

Our Response

With Children’s Hope India (CHI), UJAS ran a structured six-month mental health programme for children aged 6–21 across a pilot urban settlement and two rural settlements, Anganwa and Chokha — 238 children assessed and supported through 64 sessions in total.

Each child was screened using five standardised psychological tools — the Adjustment Inventory, Self-concept Scale, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, an Anxiety Rating Scale, and a Mental Health Checklist — to build an individual profile rather than treat symptoms in isolation. From there, the programme combined individual and group counselling, a ten-skill life-skills curriculum, expressive art therapy, resilience-building activities, sex education and touch sensitisation, teacher training to recognise mental health warning signs, and Parent–Child Interaction Therapy. School-based mental health clubs gave children an ongoing safe space to talk about what they were carrying.

What the Data Showed

Across the two rural settlements, close to 6 in 10 children showed good overall mental health, with a meaningful gap between Chokha (61.3%) and Anganwa (57.7%) pointing to settlement-specific stressors worth investigating further. More urgently, 11.2% of children showed severe anxiety symptoms, higher in Anganwa (12.3%) than Chokha (10.1%) — and a substantial share of children struggled with adjustment to their new lives, underscoring how much distress migration and resettlement can still carry years after a family arrives.

Looking Ahead

CHI and UJAS have proposed extending the model with age-segmented interventions — separate tracks for children and youth, adults, and the elderly — and expanding beyond the pilot settlements, alongside sustained teacher training, language-appropriate communication support, and advocacy for policy that recognises the mental health needs of migrant children.