Ongoing legal uncertainty was identified by mental health experts interviewed for this research as actively impeding a stateless person’s ability to address existing mental health issues or trauma. “The truth is when clients are in such an uncertain and I guess unresolved situation, it feels like they’re in limbo a lot of the time, trauma processing can be really hard because they’re not actually in a safe place overall because they don’t know if their future is certain. So we can certainly work on reducing those trauma symptoms, but I do find that…until a visa situation is resolved, it’s really hard to really resolve those trauma symptoms and process that trauma because they’re not fully safe yet.” — Psychologist, Torture and Trauma Rehabilitation Service Mental health issues are further exacerbated by restrictions placed on stateless people in Australia through their visa status. “Speaking generally from what I hear from families who are not permanent residents or citizens, it is the sense of hopelessness they endure, often for years, as they are unable to participate in the community through employment, and therefore unable to feel they are settling in and improving things for their family. Many families are completely reliant on charities to cover every single expense, so they live in a state of constant anxiety. The mental and physical health impacts of living like this are huge, on top of the trauma they already experienced before coming to Australia. I have had many families so depressed by the conditions they are living under that they have started to think that they are better off in their own country- a country which they have fled for reasons of persecution and are, realistically, unable to return to. This is the impact of the Australian system on them.” — Health Worker Mental health was identified as a particular issue for young people in the stateless community, compounded by the inter-generational trauma they witness their parents and grandparents struggling with. “I see so many young people in my community struggling with their mental health. I’d say 90% of the people I know are around my age or even younger. I’ve even seen kids as young as eight or nine years old already struggling with symptoms I didn’t develop until late in high school. We experience the effects of intergenerational trauma; even my siblings who were born here after we came. They grow up in a family where everyone’s traumatised, so they observe that, they wear that. It’s in their DNA.” — Asma 64 Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness | Understanding Statelessness in Australia Uncertainty about the future has an especially negative impact on young people, in part because there is no possibility of further education or work without a visa pathway. The inability to access further education was observed by policy experts as compounding the overall mental health challenges experienced by stateless young people in Australia. “Well, it destroys their whole future, because kids will say, ‘What’s the point of going to high school? What’s the point of studying in high school, because I can’t get a university degree, I can’t get a job in Australia. There’s no future for me, there’s no point in trying.’ It’s quite detrimental in a number of ways, and it’s a wasted potential in terms of their own personal potential, potential to benefit Australia. Mental health implications for that and them, yeah, it’s breaking people. The study part is one part of it, but also the uncertainty of not knowing where you’re going to be. If you have to be uprooted again after you’ve, maybe gone through high school in Australia, now you have to uproot yourself and got to the US, or New Zealand, or a whole new country, start again. After they’ve spent years in detention as well, and in another country. Yeah, the whole process is, yeah, has really broken people, and families, and especially young people.” — Refugee Policy Expert Research indicated that for young people, there was a sense of having lost their lives, first to immigration detention, and then due to being prevented from pursuing a future for themselves. “And the other thing I see a lot of is kids—kids who are now in their twenties, who were real kids on the island (Nauru) 10-12 years ago, they’re all in a really bad state, because they just feel like they’ve lost their lives. Like the best years of their life have been spent detained somewhere, or in just this really hopeless position in Australia with no clear future. And especially when they leave school, and all their friends from school go onto further study or whatever, and they can’t do anything that they want to do. So, almost all of the sort of late teens, early twenties are in a really bad way. To the point where they can’t engage with us, we have to speak to their parents. They can’t even take a phone call from us, because they’re spending all day in bed, in their room with the door shut sort of thing. And their parents are just frantic with worry, but there’s nothing they can do, which is the whole problem. They have no power over anything in their lives.” — Ben Carrick, Australian Legal Practitioner, Refugee and Immigration Legal Service