Perinatal mental health concerns, including depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders, affect a substantial number of birthing people worldwide and can influence infant development, family wellbeing, and social outcomes. Canadian surveillance indicates variation in perinatal mental health estimates by province and data source; national and provincial findings suggest notable prevalence and service use during pregnancy and the first postpartum year. Immigrant populations, including those from South Asian backgrounds, may experience a higher burden due to migration-related stressors, social isolation, stigma, language barriers, and limited access to culturally safe care.
South Asian peoples constitute one of the largest and fastest-growing immigrant groups in Canada, with over 2 million individuals nationally. The intersection of migration experiences with culturally specific family structures, gender norms, language diversity, and stigmatizing beliefs about mental health may shape symptom recognition, disclosure, and help-seeking among South Asian immigrant women in ways that differ from aggregated immigrant samples. Prior reviews of immigrant perinatal mental health exist, but literature specifically focused on South Asian immigrant women in Canada across the full perinatal period has not been comprehensively mapped.
The primary question guiding this scoping review is: What is currently known about perinatal mental health among South Asian immigrant women in Canada? The review aims to map and synthesize the existing evidence on studied outcomes, populations represented or missing, assessment tools used, reported barriers and facilitators to care, and how South Asian subgroups and immigration-related variables are described across the literature.
For this review, “South Asian immigrant women” are women residing in Canada who were born in South Asian countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, or Maldives. Immigration pathways include permanent residency, refugee or asylum status, temporary residence, international study, and work permits. The perinatal period is defined as pregnancy through 12 months postpartum and includes antenatal and postnatal stages.
Perinatal mental health outcomes of interest encompass depression, anxiety, stress, trauma, psychological distress, coping, resilience, and emotional wellbeing. Healthcare provider perspectives are included only when findings specifically address perinatal mental health or access to services for South Asian immigrant women in Canada.
Participants: Foreign-born women from the listed South Asian countries residing in Canada during pregnancy and/or up to 12 months postpartum. Studies must clearly identify participants as South Asian immigrants in Canada; studies without clear country-of-origin or migration-status data will be excluded. Mixed-population studies are included only if South Asian-specific data are reported or extractable.
Concept: Studies assessing prevalence, risk and protective factors, barriers and facilitators to care, help-seeking experiences, interventions, or other outcomes related to perinatal mental health within the defined timeframe.
Context: Research conducted in Canada focused on the perinatal period. Studies from other countries or outside the perinatal timeframe will be excluded.
The review will consider peer-reviewed empirical studies using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods designs. Eligible qualitative approaches may include phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, qualitative description, and community-based participatory research. Quantitative designs may include observational and interventional studies reporting relevant perinatal mental health outcomes.
Relevant grey literature will be included when sufficient information is available; sources identified for targeted grey-literature searches include Canadian government and public-health agencies, mental-health organizations, provincial agencies, South Asian community organizations, settlement agencies, and theses/dissertations repositories. Review articles will not serve as primary evidence but their reference lists will be screened to locate additional primary studies. Editorials, commentaries, and opinion pieces without original data will be excluded.
Searches will be conducted in MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and Scopus, selected to capture medicine, nursing and allied health, psychology, and social-science research. The search strategy will be developed with a health sciences librarian and will cover five core concepts: the perinatal period, mental health, South Asian identity or country of origin, immigration/newcomer status, and the Canadian context. An initial limited search of two databases will refine terms and index headings before adapting search strategies across all databases. The timeframe for included literature begins January 2000 and continues to the date of the final search. Grey literature searches will target relevant organizational and community websites.
Two reviewers will independently screen titles and abstracts, with disagreements resolved through discussion or third-reviewer adjudication. Full-text screening will follow the same independent and consensus-based process. Protocols and planned studies will be charted separately from completed studies because they do not report final findings. At the time of protocol publication, database searching and study selection had not yet been completed; the review will run from July 2026 through January 2027.
Data will be extracted using a standardized charting form. Extracted items will include study characteristics, participant definitions (including country of origin and immigration pathway), perinatal timeframe, mental health outcomes measured, assessment tools used, reported risk and protective factors, help-seeking experiences, barriers and facilitators to care, and methodological limitations. Immigration-related characteristics such as length of residence, migration status, and pathway will be charted when reported to enable examination of heterogeneity across groups.
Findings will be summarized using descriptive mapping and narrative synthesis to characterize the extent, range, and nature of evidence. Protocols and planned studies will be presented separately from completed studies. Consistent with scoping review methodology, formal exclusion of studies based on methodological quality will not be undertaken; however, study characteristics and reported methodological limitations will be charted to support interpretation of the evidence base.
The protocol notes that existing literature is fragmented, with variability in study design, populations, outcomes measured, and assessment methods that may limit comparability. Aggregation of diverse immigrant groups in prior work has obscured subgroup-specific findings; this review seeks to avoid that limitation by focusing on South Asian immigrant women and by charting subgroup and immigration-related characteristics. Ethics approval is not required because the review will use publicly available sources only.
The authors plan to disseminate findings through a dissertation, peer-reviewed publication, and conference presentations. The completed scoping review aims to provide a comprehensive evidence map to inform culturally responsive perinatal mental health research, clinical practice, and policy development for South Asian immigrant women in Canada. The protocol has been preregistered on the Open Science Framework (OSF DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/FZN4S).