Trauma and Mental Health Awareness

Your instinct is sound and the answer is not to become a counsellor. Your job is to notice, to keep the session safe, and to know where to point. Recognising is not diagnosing, and it does not require training you do not have.

The background is that rates of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder tend to be higher among refugees and migrants than in host populations, and WHO notes that women and girls on the move carry a higher risk of depression and anxiety in particular. So what you are seeing is common. It is also not yours to treat.

In practice: do not ask her to go back over the journey. Let a silence sit rather than filling it with a question. Tell her at the start that she chooses what to talk about and can end a session early without explaining, and mean it. If something opens anyway, slow down, bring the conversation back to the present and to something concrete, and close the session gently rather than pushing on to the agenda.

We had a session go that way and the thing that made it worse was the referral. I gave her a number, she called it, and the service could not offer anything in her language for weeks. She read that as being turned away and it took a long time to rebuild.

This is the part the first reply left out, and it matters more than the wording of the referral. Language is one of the documented barriers to mental health care for refugees and migrants, together with a shortage of interpreters and cultural mediators, uncertainty about how to register, and worry about confidentiality. A referral that ignores those does not fail politely, it fails in a way that feels personal.

So check the language and the waiting time before you pass a number on, and say out loud what the wait is. If nothing is available soon, say that too and stay in contact through it rather than handing over and stepping back.

One thing to avoid entirely: do not use a family member as the interpreter, and be careful about a friend she will keep seeing. What she can say changes completely depending on who is in the room.