Unquiet Minds: Agency, Inclusivity, and Mental Health in Racialized Muslim Canadian Youth

Drawing on his forthcoming University of Toronto Press book, Dr. Mustahid Husain examines the mental health experiences of racialized Muslim Canadian youth, with a focus on the Bangladeshi-Canadian community in the Greater Toronto Area. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, focus groups, and creative methods such as PhotoVoice and body mapping, the talk explores how young people navigate the collision of Western individualism and diasporic collectivism, the pressure of professional and marital expectations, and the intergenerational transmission of migration-related trauma. Particular attention is given to how gender and sexuality shape these struggles, from the gendered burdens placed on sons and daughters to the specific silences faced by queer and gender-diverse youth. Husain argues that these young people should not be understood as isolated cases of individual pathology, but as participants in an inherited family and community trauma and drama shaped by migration, class aspiration, and unspoken love. The talk situates these findings within broader debates in psychoanalytic anthropology and diaspora studies, asking what agency, healing, and inclusion can look like for a generation caught between competing worlds. It closes by considering pathways toward more culturally responsive mental health support.

Mustahid Husain is an Adjunct Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His research explores the unconscious and diaspora, using psychoanalytic, digital, and feminist methods to examine trauma and resilience among racialized immigrant communities, particularly Bangladeshi-Canadians. He is author of Development, Neoliberalism, and Islamism in South Asia (Palgrave, 2022) and Masculinity and Mental Health of Muslim Men of Colour (Palgrave, 2024), with Unquiet Minds forthcoming from University of Toronto Press. He also writes fiction, including the novel Double Truths. He completed his doctoral and postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia.