A person who is attempting to live fully in one nation while emotionally connected to another experiences a certain kind of exhaustion. This weariness has been growing for years among British Pakistanis, a community that spans Birmingham curry shops and Mirpur family WhatsApp groups, Bradford school runs, and rupee-to-pound conversations at kitchen tables. It’s not overly dramatic. It doesn’t make an announcement. It has everything to do with the collision between Pakistan’s diplomatic challenges overseas and the day-to-day grind of being obviously Muslim in a nation that isn’t always sure how it feels about that, but it’s there, sitting in the chest like a low hum that won’t go away.
For the diaspora, Pakistan‘s ongoing negotiations with the IMF, its precarious position between major geopolitical actors, and its reputation as a nation constantly on the verge of economic collapse are not abstract headlines. When your cousin in Rawalpindi recently lost his job due to inflation eating away at his employer’s profits, or when your mother still resides in Lahore, they land differently. Family phone conversations, forwarded news clips on Telegram, and the unique silence that results when a relative refuses to acknowledge how bad things have gotten are all ways that Pakistan is subject to diplomatic pressure from around the world. When that silence is multiplied over thousands of homes in south Manchester and east London, it creates a type of collective secondary trauma that is rarely identified as such.
In the meantime, British life presents its own harsh challenges. The cost-of-living crisis has disproportionately affected British Pakistani households, whose high rates of poverty predate the recent spike in inflation but have been exacerbated by it. Stress related to housing, energy costs, and the silent humiliation of having to choose between groceries and heating are not specific to any one ethnic group, but they are more prevalent in areas where transnational concerns already exist. Something starts to crumble when you combine that with the ongoing background radiation of Islamophobia, the hypervigilance that comes with knowing your name, or the possibility that your headscarf will cost you a job interview.
The fact that all of this is still invisible may be its most harmful feature. In Pakistani communities, stigma around mental health persists as a sort of unwritten consensus, both in the UK and at home. Depression is reinterpreted as a lack of faith. You are supposed to pray through anxiety. Therapy seems strange, even dubious. The British Asian Trust and other organizations have been trying to break that silence, but cultural change takes time, and there is still a huge gap between the amount of support that is available and what is actually needed. The concept that mental health is a medical issue rather than a moral failing is still in its infancy in Pakistan, where there are fewer than 500 psychiatrists for a quarter of a billion people.
The younger generation of British Pakistanis, those in their twenties and thirties, is perceived as being in a particularly challenging situation. They are sufficiently rooted in British culture to feel the pain of not fully belonging, but they are also sufficiently connected to Pakistan via social media to take in every political crisis in real time. It compounds in ways that older generations may not fully understand, such as the weariness of code-switching between cultures, the guilt of relative comfort, and the frustration of witnessing family members suffer from a distance. It’s still unclear if this generation will be the first to normalize mental health discussions in the community, but the pressure to do so is not going away.
The sheer accumulation is what sets this moment apart from earlier decades. There are multiple crises. It’s the layers: discrimination in between, economic hardship at home, diplomatic tension overseas, and a cultural unwillingness to acknowledge any of it for what it is. British Pakistanis are holding more than most people in their immediate vicinity are aware of, and the weight of that holding—carried covertly between two time zones—deserves far more attention than it presently gets.