‘My generation has been destroyed’ — Inside the mental health crisis facing Michigan’s Muslim youth

Nadine Jawad, a fellow Knight-Hennessy scholar, and I were sitting on a shared mentor’s sun-drenched porch nibbling trail mix when she mentioned the bodies.

I cut Nadine off. “What?!?”

She rolled her eyes. It’s not just her dad, who has for years been a ritual body washer at the largest mosque in Michigan’s Arab-American enclave, Nadine said: everybody knows about the young men dying. And nobody really talks about it, she added, but we know why, too: opioid overdoses.

But I, perhaps in my naivete, was stunned. Young Arab-American men dying from opioids in the country’s densest Muslim community? That felt like a radically different narrative from the “Deaths of Despair” archetype—mostly middle aged, mostly white, often in rural regions like the Appalachians—I’d associated with the worst of the opioid epidemic.

Within months, we were back in Dearborn—the suburb 30 minutes outside of Detroit where Nadine grew up—over Ramadan, speaking with doctors, religious leaders, community advocates, and impacted families themselves over adeni chai and maqlouba.

Over the next two years, our aperture widened further still. This wasn’t just a story of one or two bad batches of drugs. This was a story of mental illness, stoked in part by a decades-long FBI counterterror agenda for which Islam ranked amongst the greatest threats to the country. It was a story of how government activities may have deliberately fractured a community, fostered internalized Islamophobia, and fomented social isolation in ways that—in an era of fentanyl—imperiled the wellbeing of a “9/11 generation” of young Arab-Americans.

You can read our investigation, which was published on March 7th, in Rolling Stone. (An alternate link via Yahoo News is available here.)

Eli Cahan (2019 cohort), from New York, New York, completed his master’s degree in health policy at Stanford School of Medicine in 2021. He graduated from University of Michigan with a bachelor's degree in business administration and from NYU School of Medicine with a medical degree. Eli aspires to be a neonatologist and investigative journalist. His journalistic work has been published in The Washington Post, LA Times, The Guardian, USA Today, and elsewhere. His academic work has been published in NEJM, JAMA, Health Affairs, BMJ, and elsewhere. He is currently a resident in pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital, Journalist-in-Residence at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Associate Director of Stanford’s Health Equity Media Fellowship, and one of this year’s National Science-Health-Environmental Reporting Fellows.

Nadine Jawad (2020 cohort), from Dearborn, Michigan, is pursuing an MD at Stanford School of Medicine. She earned a bachelor’s degree in public policy at the University of Michigan, and a master’s degree in comparative social policy at the University of Oxford. Nadine aspires to work in preventive medicine and public health. She is also interested in narrative medicine, journalism, and medical humanities. Her research focuses on implementation science in the field of primary care and behavioral health integration. Nadine is also a recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship and Harry S. Truman Scholarship.

Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.