The review was conducted using the Arksey and O’Malley scoping review framework and reported according to the PRISMA-ScR checklist, a rigorous standard for transparent evidence synthesis. The author searched PubMed Central, CINAHL, and Scopus, guided by the Population, Concept, and Context framework recommended by the Joanna Briggs Institute. From an initial pool of 1,138 records, screening and eligibility checks narrowed the field to 29 studies, spanning quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, mixed-methods designs, and prior reviews. Inter-rater reliability among the three screeners exceeded the accepted threshold, with kappa coefficients of 0.79 or higher, lending confidence to the study selection process.

The populations at the center of this work are distinct but overlapping. Muslim American women are defined by religious identity regardless of ethnic background; Arab American women are defined by ethnic origin and may hold any or no faith; and Arab Muslim American women sit at the intersection of both. The 2020 U.S. Religion Census counted roughly 4.5 million Muslims and more than 3.5 million Arab Americans in the country, with women comprising about half of each group. Most Arab Americans are Christian, a fact often obscured in public discourse, and Muslim Americans span a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds. This heterogeneity matters clinically, because the review found that the evidence base itself is uneven: findings on discrimination and faith-based resilience draw predominantly from Muslim-identified samples, while perinatal findings draw mostly from Arab-ethnicity samples, leaving the intersectional group studied only rarely.

The mental health burden documented across the studies is striking. Depression was the most commonly studied outcome, appearing in 18 of the 29 included studies. One nationally representative analysis of 2019 data from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that American Muslims were roughly twice as likely as other religious groups to report having attempted suicide at least once in their lifetimes, with about 8 percent reporting a lifetime attempt compared with 6 percent of Catholics, 5 percent of Protestants, and 3.6 percent of Jewish respondents. Notably, religiosity did not reduce this risk, contradicting a common assumption within Muslim communities that faith alone protects against suicidality. The researchers instead pointed to religious discrimination and community-level mental health stigma as the greatest contributors to the disparity.

Trauma research adds another layer of complexity. Among severely traumatized Arab immigrant women, pre-migration persecution significantly predicted post-traumatic stress disorder, while post-migration stressors such as discrimination and acculturative stress predicted both PTSD and major depressive disorder. Social support emerged as the most salient protective resource after migration. These findings align with minority stress theory, which holds that chronic, cumulative stressors such as prejudice and stigma impose an added psychological burden on minority communities, and with intersectionality theory, which describes how overlapping identities such as gender, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status interact multiplicatively rather than additively to shape disadvantage.

Barriers to care operate at every level of the social ecology. At the individual level, internalized stigma was significantly associated with depression among 373 Muslim women surveyed across the United States, a phenomenon the researchers described as double jeopardy: being discriminated against simultaneously for Muslim identity and for mental illness. At the family and community level, a socio-ecological study of Arab-Muslims found that shame, concerns about family honor, and community pressure were the primary suppressors of formal help-seeking, especially among women, reinforcing the expectation that psychological struggles are private family matters. At the structural level, negative beliefs about mental health causation, rejection of formal services, and low familiarity with professional care predicted underutilization, with patterns varying by ethnicity; Arab Muslim women reported lower familiarity with mental health services than White Muslim women, suggesting that ethnicity shapes access pathways even within a shared religious community.

Discrimination within clinical settings themselves is among the most alarming findings. In a survey of 254 Muslim women in Chicago, nearly 30 percent reported that providers did not listen to them, 25.4 percent said they were treated with less courtesy than non-Muslim patients, and 24.3 percent felt their provider treated them with less competence. A separate study introduced the concept of solo status, being the only Muslim in a given context, as a moderator of the psychological impact of discrimination, particularly for women who consistently wear the hijab. Meanwhile, 53 percent of Muslim women in one Chicago survey reported delaying care because female providers were unavailable, and higher religiosity and modesty concerns were independently associated with care delay. Encouragingly, living in the United States for more than 20 years was associated with a substantially lower risk of delay, indicating that acculturation softens, though never fully eliminates, these barriers.

The perinatal period emerges as a critical window of vulnerability. In Dearborn, Michigan, a cross-sectional study of 115 Arab immigrant women found that economic vulnerability, antenatal anxiety, higher education, and lower social support predicted postpartum depression symptoms; 88 percent of participants lived in households earning under $40,000 annually, and 68 percent preferred to be interviewed in Arabic. A follow-up study found that 25 percent of the women met the clinical cutoff on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, with symptoms positively associated with marginalization. Acculturative stress, trauma exposure, and depressive symptoms also predicted impaired maternal bonding among immigrant and refugee Arab American women in Detroit. Adding to the clinical gap, Arab Muslim women who experienced perinatal loss in U.S. hospitals encountered providers unfamiliar with Islamic bereavement practices, including ritual washing, prayer, and burial timing, a failure the review attributes not to malice but to structural omission.

Yet the review’s most hopeful findings concern faith and culturally congruent care. A mixed-methods scoping review found that prayer, Quranic recitation, supplication, and listening to prayer recordings reduced anxiety, depression, stress, pain, and fear among Muslim women during pregnancy, childbirth, cesarean delivery, and infant loss, prompting recommendations to integrate these practices into perinatal settings as non-pharmacological supports. Qualitative work with 19 Muslim women in Chicago revealed strong preferences for faith-integrated, female-only interventions delivered within mosques, with trusted community messengers seen as essential to acceptability. A community-based participatory psychoeducation program in the San Francisco Bay Area, run in partnership with a mosque, decreased mental health stigma and improved mental health knowledge. A medical school curriculum integrating Arab and Muslim health content improved provider knowledge on pre-post assessment, pointing to a scalable route for building cultural humility, the lifelong practice of self-evaluation and redressing power imbalances that researchers argue should replace one-off cultural competence training.

The review’s conclusions carry significant policy weight. Until March 2024, when the Office of Management and Budget added a dedicated Middle Eastern and North African category to federal data standards, Arab Americans were statistically invisible in federal health surveillance, folded into the White racial category and obscuring their disparities. The operationalization of the MENA category in health surveys, insurance claims, and clinical registries now offers, for the first time, an epidemiological infrastructure to justify targeted investment in mental health services. The author calls for greater investment in cultural humility training, disaggregated national data, and intersectional longitudinal studies, alongside expanded community-based participatory research that treats mosques and community institutions as partners rather than passive beneficiaries. Mosque-based, faith-integrated interventions have demonstrated good acceptability, though evidence of their effectiveness remains preliminary, making rigorous evaluation the next frontier. For a population that has carried its distress largely in silence, the message of this synthesis is clear: the burden is real, the barriers are measurable, and the path to equitable care runs directly through faith, community, and a healthcare system willing to meet women where they are.

Subject of Research: Mental health outcomes, help-seeking barriers, and culturally congruent care among Muslim and Arab American women in the United States

Article Title: Mental health, resilience, and culturally congruent care among Muslim and Arab American women in the United States: a scoping review

Article References: Mohammad, L. (2026). Mental health, resilience, and culturally congruent care among Muslim and Arab American women in the United States: a scoping review. Frontiers in Global Women's Health, 7, Article 1931567. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgwh.2026.1931567

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fgwh.2026.1931567

Keywords: mental health, Muslim American women, Arab American women, culturally congruent care, Islamophobia, perinatal depression, health disparities, scoping review, minority stress, faith-based interventions, cultural humility, help-seeking barriers