Kent Sikhs

An in-depth understanding of the mental health of Sikhs in the UK remains elusive for researchers and healthcare providers alike. Too often, this community is folded into broad and imprecise labels such as ‘South Asian’ or ‘Indian’ — terms that obscure rather than illuminate. Such generalisation glosses over the unique experiences shaped by specific cultural, religious, and social forces, including racism, sexism, and structural disadvantage, that affect distinct groups within these larger categories.

The roots of the UK’s Sikh population trace primarily to the Punjab region in Northwest India and to East Africa. Many Sikhs migrated to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. By the time of the 2021 UK census, 524,000 Sikhs had made their home in the country—roughly 1% of the national population. Among the regions where the community has flourished is Kent, which now hosts a vibrant community of more than 74,000 Sikhs.

In response to the need for deeper insights, a transdisciplinary research team from Warwick Medical School and the Kent and Medway Medical School has embarked on a collaborative journey. Working closely with Punjabi Sikhs living in Kent, along with mental health professionals and local third-sector organisations, we seek to uncover the complex web of factors contributing to mental ill health in the community. Through anthropological fieldwork in the Sikh community, we are exploring how health beliefs, migration stories, and encounters with racism shape the lives of Sikhs.

The voices of Sikh community members, paired with the perspectives of healthcare workers, local organisations, and researchers, have brought forward fresh and meaningful insights. These insights will guide the co-creation of tailored mental health interventions—produced specifically with and for the Sikh community, ensuring that their distinct cultural context is not just acknowledged, but central to the mental health solutions designed to support them. 

The research programme started in the Spring of 2022 and is co-led by anthropologist Lisa Dikomitis and psychiatrist Sukhwinder Shergill, includes a group of Sikh community co-researchers, PhD students Aman Rattan and Hasara Nuwangi, and artists, including audio documentary maker Elena Dikomitis and photographer Jaspreet Bath. Our anthropological study with a large Kent Sikh community has been ongoing since then, through ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Lisa Dikomitis, who examines health beliefs and experiences of migration and racism across different generations of Sikhs. 

Podcast: Sikh silences across generations

Some silences travel across countries and generations. These silences are passed on and exchanged among first, second and third generation Punjabi Sikhs living in Kent, in the United Kingdom. This is about keeping quiet, being quiet, losing voice, feeling alone, being ‘othered’. And the heavy weight of silence as a response to stigma and racism, especially in the so-called ‘sandwich generation’, Sikhs whose parent migrated from India to England and whose children were born in England and identify as Asian, Indian, Sikh and British. The silencing is both individual and collective, and the silences are often overwhelmingly loud. 

You can listen to the podcast here.

Article: Why psychiatry needs ethnography

One of our academic articles resulting from this research is a call to do mental health research differently. It is a call to listen differently—to see psychiatry not just as diagnosis, but as dialogue. We propose intertwining the clinical gaze with the ethnographic ear, merging anthropology and psychiatry to reveal the layered truths of mental health across cultures, uncovering what surveys overlook and what only trust can bring to light. Through lived immersion, we can unveil hidden truths: the weight of silence, the echoes of migration, the quiet persistence of suffering. You can read the article in full below. This was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.