“Centre people’s lived experiences in conversations about mental health, and find avenues to create community.”

Nazifa Nawal speaks with the Terry Fox Humanitarian Award on lived experience, community, and mental health that leads to real change.

On October 10, the world marked World Mental Health Day. This year’s theme is “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change.” It asks us to listen to people living with mental health challenges, and to let their voices shape policy, services, and systems.

Nazifa Nawal has been living that message for years. A fourth-year psychology student at UBC minoring in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, she moved to Vancouver from Bangladesh at age eight. In high school, she founded the first student-run BIPOC club in the Vancouver School Board at Britannia Secondary. As a participant-researcher on UBC’s Agenda Gap project, she helped write calls to action about racism’s impact on youth mental health, work that came directly from young people telling their own stories. She is now preparing for a career in law, focused on human rights and criminal law.

In this conversation, Nazifa reflects on what awareness campaigns are still missing, why lived experience must lead mental health conversations, and what it means to build spaces where young people feel heard, supported, and like they belong.

 

TFHA: After years of community and research work in the mental health space, what do days of recognition, like Mental Health Awareness Month or Bell Let’s Talk Day get right? And where can they improve?

Nazifa Nawal: I think this year’s campaign is really good and interesting, and it touches on a discussion that’s been a long time coming. The research I was part of through Agenda Gap spoke a lot to the focus on people’s lived experience. The project we worked on, about the school liaison officer and the removal of that role, is only something that could have come up through personal experience. That role had been established for many years, so someone on the school board who hadn’t actually lived it would never know how it was really going.

Bell Let’s Talk, for example. I’ve been seeing it every year for many years, but only as a social media campaign. A viral, catchy photo, a hashtag, a slogan. You’re not talking about anything actually vital to mental health. That’s good in one sense. You’re getting the word out, and a few years ago “mental health” wasn’t even spoken about that much. But these campaigns should ask more of their audience. All they’re asking for is ten seconds of your time: look at this image, like it, share it, you’re done for the day. They should be a chance to spread actual information about mental health, like how to access resources in your community or how to build support systems.

I did see that Bell Let’s Talk donated $10 million to mental health, and that’s probably great. But I still have no idea what it’s going towards. Spreading awareness has become really easy, and we’ve been doing it for years. It’s time to take it one step further and actually mobilize people to act.

 

TFHA: What does taking action look like, in an ideal world, for regular people seeing these posts?

Nazifa Nawal: In terms of mental health, it could be giving someone the courage to reach out for support or counselling, whatever they may need in their journey, or simply reaching out to a friend. A lot of mental health struggles come from a lack of community and support around you.

On a personal level, campaigns should encourage you to connect with the people around you, connect with your community, and put yourself in spaces with like-minded people. And they should also urge institutions to do better, to improve their systems and the services they offer.

 

TFHA: How can institutions work toward improving mental health support?

Nazifa Nawal: At this point in Canada, mental health support exists. Counselling and therapy exist on a wide range, and institutions have peer support groups. I just think they could be more effective and more efficient. The health care system in Canada is very slow and very hard to access, and that’s not just financially. You wait months to see a counsellor, or hours in the emergency room. The population is growing fast, but the ratio of healthcare and mental health workers to patients is very low.

What I see around me is not “there’s no counsellor” or “where do I go?” It’s “I’m on a waitlist for five months,” or “the counsellor I met isn’t the right match,” and getting a referral is its own challenge.

Institutional support is the same. There may be mental health resources, but they’re very short-term. You might get a counsellor five times, maximum. Long-term options should be available too, because after those five sessions you’re kind of left on your own, with no transition. And the range is narrow. Counselling can be the only form of support available. There should be different types of therapies, or access to a psychiatrist provided as well.

For people of colour, queer people, immigrants, people who carry lived histories in specific cultural contexts, a lot of counsellors don’t tend to understand, maybe because they’re not from that background. That becomes a barrier too. If you’re spending half of your fifty minutes just explaining “I grew up this way because in my country this is normal and that is not,” when do you actually get to talk about what’s been bothering you?

Diversity matters in mental health, so you can have people who understand you. That’s a problem I’ve seen around me and faced myself.

 

TFHA: You started the first student-run BIPOC club in the Vancouver School Board. Can you talk about the link between having a space to belong and mental health?

Nazifa Nawal: Something I’ve come to realize is that my generation cares a lot about social issues, not just where we live but what’s going on in the world. Agenda Gap and the BIPOC club both came to be because BLM was so heavily on our minds, just after 2020. And because our generation cares so much, we want to do something about it.

Even recently, the news of the Cornell 7 has been heavily on my mind, maybe I’ve spent too much time reading and thinking about it. And in that time, what I’d want is to talk to someone else who gets it, who’s feeling the same way. That’s what came to mind for me and the peers I did this with: we need an in-person space, a community of like-minded people who can come together and just talk.

There’s no grand mission. Just be yourself, talk about what’s on your mind, listen to what others have to say, share your experiences, feel seen, feel like you belong. That’s getting harder and harder in the age of social media. We’re more isolated than previous generations.

So we created that space. Once a week, at this time, this club exists. We meet, we talk for an hour, and we forget about everything else going on. That led to events at school and different initiatives, talking about the histories of different communities but also celebrating excellence, events for Black History Month and Asian Heritage Month.

I realized that spaces for open dialogue really create community, because you find people carrying that same weight. You see all these horrible things happening, they affect you so much, but you can’t do much about them other than talk. Creating that support system was so important. I got a great one from that club, and I’m sure everyone there felt the same.

It also felt important for me to do it because it often takes someone inside an institution, or someone with resources, to make these things happen. People may want to, but they’re not always able to. That burden should fall on institutions, or on student leaders, because not everyone can carry it.

 

 

TFHA: Tell us about your work on Agenda Gap, and what that research taught you that most people don’t know.

Nazifa Nawal: It was a research project out of UBC’s School of Nursing, and I was a participant-researcher. It was structured as weekly meetings where I’d talk about my idea of mental health, what I know about it, what I think should be different, what resources exist in my community. The end goal was to build something out of what we gathered, which is how we wrote the calls to action about racism’s impact on youth mental health.

Then the conversation turned to racism, and we naturally started sharing our lived experiences. That’s where the school liaison officer came up. The school I went to, Britannia, has one of the highest Indigenous populations in the city. So you can imagine, for an Indigenous person whose community carries the history of residential schools, seeing a police officer in school every day must be incredibly traumatic. And it was exactly that. People brought up so many examples of being racially profiled. This person wasn’t aggressive or a bad person, necessarily, but they were clearly targeting students of colour and Indigenous students, or people they considered troublesome. That’s not what you come to school for, and it’s not something you should have to deal with.

The lived experience was so important. That’s why we were able to present to the school board, because the school board would have had no idea any of this was happening.

Up until this year’s campaign, I don’t think marginalized communities were centered in these conversations at all. Partly because mental health is a more Western concept. In my community, the South Asian community, for example, it’s taboo to talk about. So the voices of the people most disproportionately affected have been missing from decision-making, from action.

 

TFHA: Can you tell us about your first few years in Canada, what that period asked of you, and what you learned?

Nazifa Nawal: It was hard, of course. I wouldn’t say I had the hardest time anyone has ever had, that’s not true at all. I had a very common immigrant experience. But the immigrant experience is hard to begin with. It’s isolating, it’s confusing, it’s so much change all at once. I was very little, but I still felt all of it indirectly, and there was a lot on my parents, who didn’t speak English and had to upend their lives to move here.

In terms of my mental health, the older I got, the more I felt the burden and pressure to succeed, to achieve more than anyone in my family has before, because of the sacrifices my parents made for my education and my life going forward. Even if it wasn’t active pressure from my parents, it was always in my mind, and still is to this day: I need to work harder, make them proud, make it worth it. I think that’s a feeling in every child of immigrants. It gets missed in conversations around mental health, and it’s complex to deal with.

It hit me hardest when I was applying to universities, because education was the primary reason my parents moved here. The education system back home isn’t nearly as good. At the time, it felt like those applications would change the course of my life, whether I went to university and which one. I felt so much burden and pressure, maybe pressure my own mind was creating, because it wasn’t really coming from anywhere external.

What really helped was talking to trusted adults in my life. My parents, of course, who made me feel loved and told me that regardless of the result, they’d support me and I’d be fine. And supports at school too. I talked to my counsellor, and I was very close with my teachers and staff. They all gave me the same comfort and courage to pursue what I love without the burden of feeling I have to make it.

 

TFHA: When people live through something tough, they’re often praised as “resilient.” How does that word land for you?

Nazifa Nawal: It’s become this buzzword people throw around, especially in scholarships, where questions literally ask, “How have you exemplified resilience?” And I’m like, oh, so how do I shape my life story, as it is, into this story of resilience? It’s an interesting word. “Resilient” gets used a lot for historically disadvantaged communities, but the reason they’re at a disadvantage is systemic.

What I went through is a typical life of an immigrant child. I definitely went through hard times and maybe had to work harder than certain other people to get where I am. For people like that, “resilience” can be used, but I don’t think it should be tokenized, and I don’t think it should stop at praise. A lot of times people are praised for being resilient when really, that’s just their survival method. What are you going to do? You have to move forward. Obviously I have more hurdles to cross, but if I don’t get through them, I don’t get anywhere.

 

TFHA: What do institutions fail to see about mental health for immigrant and low-income youth, and what could they do better?

Nazifa Nawal: That’s a hard question. In different ways: acknowledging and recognizing the barriers people faced to get here. In applying to university, for example, a personal statement can’t go nearly deep enough into what you’ve gone through as a young person from a low-income household. Dealing with poverty or racism at such a young age is hard, and it’s sometimes hard to fit into the 5,000-character box you’ve been given.

And I don’t think people are asking institutions to do anything crazy. Start small: how do you think a person from a low-income background pays your $150 application fee, with no waiver under any circumstance, especially if they’re applying to multiple universities? Everything in these systems should come with that consideration, because not everyone arrives with the same resources. For some people that’s nothing. For a lot of people it’s not possible. Those little things get missed completely, and they make a big difference. Little things go a long way.

 

TFHA: If you had to say one thing to everybody about mental health, what would it be?

Nazifa Nawal: Centre people’s lived experiences in conversations about mental health, and find avenues to create community. On an institutional level, give people opportunities to be in community and connect with each other. And on a personal level, focus on building your support system, and pursue it.