Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the physical, mental, and social well-being of millions of people across the globe. This paper will discuss the impact of COVID-19 on preexisting and emerging mental health issues amongst various subgroups of the vulnerable population in Southeast Asia. Methods: Qualitative review of existing knowledge on mental health issues during COVID-19 pandemic among migrant laborers, women and adolescents. Conclusion: Given the profound impact of COVID -19 beyond physical health, policy makers, scientific communities and faith-based institutions should make every effort to turn the COVID-19 crisis into an opportunity by developing a strong and robust consensus that is based on building public trust in partnership to provide societal mental health, which is an unappreciated asset of a nation. We conclude that while there is considerable amount of work in the field of mental health has been done, many efforts are siloed, and do not consider the unique cultural characteristics involved. In addition to providing ventilators and acute care to COVID-19 affected patients at the hospitals, we need to design policies to allocate resources for the post-pandemic burden on our communities and develop multi-disciplinary approaches. We suggest that these approaches should become routine in healthcare settings and should be appropriate to the individual’s cultural context. We argue that the generation of robust data, scientific evidence, and multi-disciplinary resources-sharing are required that would necessitate to produce the interventions that are culturally specific and scalable.