My Language, My Feelings:Expressing Mental Health When English Is Your Second Language.

Series 1: Breaking the Silence — Destigmatising Mental Health · Article 3 of 5

She sat in the GP’s consulting room and tried to find the words. In Shona, she knew exactly what she was feeling she had a word for it that carried the weight of exhaustion, grief and displacement all at once. It was precise. It was her. But in English, the nearest she could reach for was: “I’m not coping.”

The doctor nodded, typed something, and handed her a leaflet about stress.

What was lost in that exchange was everything. The full texture of what she carried had no translation. And without the right words, the help she received could never quite reach the wound.

This article is for every woman who has ever struggled to explain in English what she knows perfectly clearly in another language. Your feelings are real. The gap between languages is real. And you deserve care that knows how to cross it.

Language Is Not Just How We Speak, It Is How We Feel

Most of us think of language as a tool we use to describe our emotions. But it is actually much more than that. Language does not only describe how we feel it shapes how deeply we feel it.

Think about this: when you hear your mother call your name in your home language, something different happens in your body than when a stranger calls it in English. When you pray in the language you were taught to pray in as a child, something deeper is reached than if you try to do it in a second language. When you weep, the words that come are rarely the ones you learned in school.

This is not a coincidence. Research consistently shows that emotional experience is more vivid, more intense and more fully processed in our first language the one our emotions were born in. When we try to describe deep feelings in a second language, something is always lost in translation. Not because we are not fluent. But because the feelings themselves live somewhere that English cannot always reach.

“When we try to describe emotional pain in a second language, we are not just translating words. We are translating the feeling itself and something is always lost.”

Why Your Mother Tongue Holds Your Feelings

There is a reason that many women who are fluent in English still struggle to describe their mental health to a British doctor. It is not a lack of vocabulary. It is a lack of emotional home.

Our first language is the one our memories are stored in. The language we were comforted in. The one we were scolded in. The one we spoke the first time we felt afraid, or heartbroken, or ashamed. When something painful happens to us, the emotional imprint of that experience is encoded in the language we were living in at the time.

This means that when we try to discuss those experiences in another language, we are doing something neurologically demanding: we are attempting to access a feeling in one language and translate it in real time into another, without losing its weight or its texture. For most of us, that is simply not possible. Not fully.

Scientists call this ‘emotional detachment’ in a second language. For us, it simply means: the words are there, but the feeling behind them feels smaller, flatter, further away. Which means that when we speak about our mental health in English, we often understate what is really happening not because we want to, but because the full version of it does not survive the crossing.

Words Our Languages Have That English Does Not

Every language has words for emotional experiences that other languages have no name for. These words exist because the communities that created them needed them because those experiences were real, common and important enough to name.

Here are some examples from languages spoken by women in our community:

Shona

Kusuruvara

A deep, heavy grief that sits in the chest.

More than sadness, it carries the weight of loss, longing and the impossibility of return. Often felt after bereavement, separation or displacement. English has no single word for it.

Arabic

Ya’es

The specific despair of losing hope.

Different from sadness or depression, it is the anguish of having hoped, and then having that hope taken away entirely. Its precise texture is absent from English.

Urdu

Dard-e-dil

Pain of the heart, an ache that is also spiritual.

A felt sorrow that lives not just in the emotions but in the soul. Deeper than heartache. It bridges the physical and the metaphysical in a way that English cannot.

Igbo

Anya-ufuo

The grief of watching suffering you cannot stop.

The specific pain of loving someone who is hurting, and being powerless to fix it. Felt deeply by migrant women watching relatives suffer from a distance.

Somali

Gini

An inner heaviness or spiritual weight.

A sense of being burdened by something unseen — accumulated distress, spiritual unease, the weight of grief that has nowhere to go. No clinical English equivalent exists.

Ndebele

Ukufa kwenhliziyo

The dying of the heart.

Used when a person has been so depleted by sorrow that they describe it in the language of death. It speaks to an exhaustion that goes far beyond tiredness.

When a woman walks into a GP appointment and the closest she can reach for is “I feel tired” or “I’m stressed” it is not because her experience is simple. It is because the English language, and the healthcare system built around it, does not have room for the fullness of what she carries.

What Happens When the System Cannot Hear You

When our emotional language and the language of the clinic do not match, the consequences are real and they fall entirely on us.

We leave appointments feeling unseen. We are prescribed tablets for a symptom when what we needed was to be heard. We are told “there is nothing wrong” because our distress did not arrive in the right format. We stop going back, because the effort of translating ourselves is exhausting and the results are rarely worth it.

This is not a personal failure. This is what happens when a healthcare system is built around one language, one culture and one way of expressing the inner life and then expects everyone who walks through its doors to conform to that.

The system is not failing you because you are too complicated. It is failing you because it has not yet learned to listen broadly enough.

💡  Something Important to Know

You have a right to a professional interpreter for any NHS appointment including mental health appointments.

You do not have to use a family member. You do not have to manage alone.

If an interpreter is not offered, you can ask for one.

If you are refused, you can contact the PALS team at your local NHS Trust.

How Different Communities Describe Emotional Pain

Mental pain does not look or sound the same in every culture. How we learned to express it or not to express it depends entirely on where we grew up and who raised us.

In many African communities, emotional distress is spoken through the body: “My heart is paining me.” “Something is pressing on my chest.” This is not a failure of psychological literacy it is a different but equally valid language for the inner life.

In many South Asian communities, emotional pain may be described in spiritual or moral terms: “I have lost my peace.” “My heart is heavy.” Depression may be understood as a sign of weak faith, which makes clinical language feel alienating, accusatory and irrelevant.

In many Arab-speaking communities, distress is often expressed relationally: “I am a burden to my family.” “I cannot fulfil my duties.” The shame attached to mental illness means it may only be named in the most indirect way.

For women who have experienced forced displacement or refugee journeys, emotional pain may have no language at all. When survival has demanded that you silence your feelings for years, the words for them may simply not be available in any language.

None of these experiences are wrong. None of them are a barrier to care. They are simply a different dialect of the human interior one that the healthcare system needs to learn to hear.

“Your feelings did not arrive in English. They deserve to be heard in the language they were born in.”

When You Are in the Room and the Words Will Not Come

We know how it feels to sit in that consulting room and sense that the words you have are not big enough for what you are carrying. We know how it feels to reach for something precise and find only the blunt shapes of a language that was not built for this.

Here are some things that can help when English does not quite reach:

💡  Practical Strategies for Appointments and Conversations

1.  Name the feeling in your language, then describe it in English.

    “In Shona, we say ‘kusuruvara’, it means a heavy grief that sits in the chest.

    That is what I feel. It is more than sadness.”

    This gives the clinician something real to work with.

2.  Use your body to point to where feelings live.

    “It is a heaviness here.”  “Something pressing on my chest.”

    “My stomach has been tight for months.”

    This is valid medical information. It is understood.

3.  Write it down in your language first.

    Before an appointment, write what you are feeling in your own language.

    Bring those notes. A professional interpreter can translate them accurately.

4.  Ask for a professional interpreter every time.

    You do not have to bring your child, your sister or your neighbor.

    You are entitled to a trained, neutral professional. Ask for one.

5.  Ask the doctor to use plain, slow English.

    You have every right to say: “I did not understand that, can you explain it differently?”

    This is not weakness. It is good healthcare.

6.  Seek multilingual peer support.

    Sometimes the deepest healing happens when you speak to someone

    who already has the words because they have felt the same things.

    Afia Clinic’s peer support sessions are available in multiple languages.

On the Power of Being Heard in Your Own Language

There is something that happens when you finally get to say, in your own language, to someone who understands it: “This is what I am carrying.”

It is not just relief. It is recognition. It is the experience of being received as a whole person, not as a translated version of yourself.

Research tells us that therapy and support are more effective when delivered in a person’s first language, or with a trained interpreter who can bridge the gap with care and precision. When we can name our pain accurately, we can begin to release it. When the people around us can hear it, something shifts.

Peer support in particular sitting with other women who share your language, your cultural references, your understanding of what it means to grieve or to be afraid in the ways that our communities do can be one of the most powerful forms of healing available. Not because a peer supporter has a clinical qualification. But because she already has the words.

A Letter to the Woman Who Has Run Out of Words

If you have been managing your mental health in a language that is not your own, for years, alone. we see you.

The effort that takes is enormous. To feel something fully, in the deep and complex language of your first world, and then to compress it into a second language, for a system that was not designed to receive it, in a room where you are already vulnerable and often afraid that is an invisible labour that nobody talks about.

You have been doing that labour. And you have been doing it quietly, without complaint, because what choice was there?

But you do not have to translate yourself any more. Not here.

Afia Clinic exists to be a space where what you carry has room to be named in whatever language it lives in. Where the words you have are enough. Where the words you don’t have yet can be found together.

Come as you are. In any language. We are here.

 💜  Come and Find Your Language at Afia Clinic

Afia Clinic offers peer support sessions, mental health workshops and health

awareness events for women in our communities.

Our sessions welcome all languages. Professional interpreters are available

upon request at every session.

📍 North East of England

🌐 Women Empowerment and Wellness Network (WEWN) North East, Engalnd

✉️ info@wewn.org.uk

All sessions are confidential.

⚠️  A note from our team

This article provides health awareness information only. It is not a substitute for

professional medical advice. If you are struggling with your mental health, please speak

to your GP or a trained professional.

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