Statelessness, Trauma and Mental Well-being From an intergenerational perspective, the stress, anxiety, or depression linked to stateless parents or caregivers can increase the internalised symptoms of their child. In addition, the timing and duration of exposure to the contextual stressful incidents can have consequences on children’s developmental outcomes. Like Andrew’s situation in the case example, cumulative risk or prolonged multiple risks and limited future economic prospects can affect the severity to which a person’s mental health is affected. A study on stateless Iraqi Kurdish children and adolescents indicates that experiences of risk factors in early childhood rather than later in adolescence have more adverse consequences.44 Thus, from a multi-systemic approach, there is a need to work with the whole family, irrespective of the nature of statelessness in that family unit. This also calls for further research on the family’s functioning, as impacted by statelessness. Daily stressors associated with the lives of stateless persons can be of more urgent concern than past traumatic events. This is because they play a significant role in mental health outcomes and ought to be considered as potential avenues for intervention, in reducing mental health symptoms and increasing functioning and wellness. This is consistent with the belief that healthy coping and resilience can be fostered by supportive recovery environments. When engaging with stateless persons, it is important to maintain an attitude that empowers the person, acknowledging their worth, rather than seeing them as sources and carriers of pathology. This is based on the belief that the stateless person has agency and is best able to understand their needs45 and challenges. They must, therefore, be included in the development and design of intervention plans to alleviate their problems. The findings emphasise the importance of investigating and researching associations between human rights violations and mental health, with a focus on preventative strategies and integrated interventions. Future research can look at how rights violations and the resulting trauma from statelessness become internalised by individuals and communities and from there seek to identify interventions that can be implemented early. Addressing mental health symptoms alone in stateless persons or simply assigning them a nationality, is insufficient. This paper emphasises integrated and holistic rather than siloed approaches when intervening on statelessness issues. Trauma practitioners such as social workers, psychologists, and counsellors should work in partnerships with legal practitioners and activists to reduce emotional distress while strengthening coping strategies and resilience and addressing systemic rights violations. In addition, the unique situations, rights violations experiences, social exclusion, and ‘vulnerability of stateless persons as compared to many other nonnationals require a greater openness to granting more favourable rights to stateless persons than to other migrants who are not so fundamentally disadvantaged’.46 En Chi Chen ‘Stateless Iraqi Kurdish children and adolescents’ mental health: A scoping review’ (2020) Research Square at 22, available at https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-113316/v1 45 Asako Ejima (2021) op cit note 16 357 at 379. 46 Katherine Perks & Amal de Chickera ‘The silent stateless and the unhearing world: Can equality compel us to listen?’ (2009) 3 Equal Rights Review 42 at 51. 44 53