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This review and theoretical analysis paper aims to bring together literatures of place, mobility, refugees and mental health to problematise the ways in which social support is practised on the ground and to rethink its possibilities.

This paper draws on an interdisciplinary understanding of social support that focusses on the social networks and significant and intimate relationships that mitigate negative mental health and well-being outcomes. The authors explore the dialectic relationship between place and mobility in refugee experiences of social support.

The authors argue that, in an Euro-American context, practices of social support have historically been predicated on the idea of people-in-place. The figure of the refugee challenges the notion of a settled person in need of support and suggests that people are both in place and in motion at the same time. Conversely, attending to refugees’ biographies, lived experiences and everyday lives suggests that places and encounters of social support are varied and go beyond institutional spaces.

The authors explore this dialectic of personhood as both in place and in motion and its implications for the theorisation, research and design of systems of social support for refugees.

This paper surfaces the dialectics of place and mobility for supporting refugee mental health from an interdisciplinary perspective.

This paper aims to first demonstrate the prevalence and methodological and theoretical limitations of approaches oriented towards either migrants entitlement or their access to health care; and, second, to demonstrate an alternative approach involving a conceptual and analytical framework that integrates these perspectives as levels of analysis within a holistic model.

The paper consists of three brief case studies each demonstrating particular difficulties in adopting either policy oriented “entitlement” approaches or practice driven orientations examining migrants access to health care. Each case study will examine briefly an aspect of the policy and legal frameworks within which health care is delivered to immigrants. The studies encompass the phenomenon of “hidden” immigrant children in Sweden, migrants crossing the Spanish border from North Africa, and asylum seekers in the UK.

The case studies form a basis for presenting an integrated model encompassing a multi‐level framework for examining the health care of migrant populations.

The international applicability of the model is discussed drawing further on the author's work as scientific advisor to the EU on immigrant health and as lead researcher in a four country EU study into refugee health and social care.