Transcultural Psychiatry

The importance of the family as a unit in the aftermath of trauma necessitates the use of family interventions among immigrants and refugees. While abundant clinical material suggests that family-based trauma interventions are applicable across cultures, very little is known about the extent to which family treatment modalities are effective for immigrants and refugees. We conducted a systematic review of intervention studies that have been designed or modified specifically for traumatized immigrant and refugee families. The terms “trauma,” “family,” and “immigrants/refugees/culture” were used along with different terms for “intervention.” Studies with no research methodology were excluded. Only 6 experimental studies met our inclusion criteria; 4 of them describe school-based interventions and 2 present multifamily support groups. The shortage of research in this area does not allow clear conclusions about the effectiveness of family interventions for traumatized immigrants or refugees. The complexity of employing methodologically rigorous research in small communities is discussed. Future trials should go beyond the individualistic approach and focus on posttraumatic stress disorder to address family-level processes, such as family relationship, communication, and resilience.

The negative psychological impacts of working with traumatised people are well documented and include vicarious traumatisation (VT): the cumulative effect of identifying with clients' trauma stories that negatively impacts on service providers' memory, emotions, thoughts, and worldviews. More recently, the concept of vicarious resilience (VR) has been also identified: the strength, growth, and empowerment experienced by trauma workers as a consequence of their work. VR includes service providers' awareness and appreciation of their clients' capacity to grow, maintaining hope for change, as well as learning from and reassessing personal problems in the light of clients' stories of perseverance, strength, and growth. This study aimed at exploring the experiences of mental health, physical healthcare, and settlement workers caring for refugees and asylum seekers in South Australia. Using a qualitative method (data-based thematic analysis) to collect and analyse 26 semi-structured face-to-face interviews, we identified four prominent and recurring themes emanating from the data: VT, VR, work satisfaction, and cultural flexibility. These findings—among the first to describe both VT and VR in Australians working with refugee people—have important implications for policy, service quality, service providers' wellbeing, and refugee clients' lives.

Refugee young people have been identified as a group with high risk for mental health problems, due to their experience of trauma, forced migration, and stressors associated with settlement. A high prevalence of mental health problems is reported in this group, however some research suggests refugee young people have low rates of mental health service access. There is little information available on barriers and facilitators to mental service delivery for this group. Using data from 15 focus groups and five key informant interviews with a total of 115 service providers from 12 agencies in Melbourne, Australia, this paper explores barriers and facilitators to engaging young people from refugee backgrounds with mental health services. Eight key themes emerged: cultural concepts of mental health, illness, and treatment; service accessibility; trust; working with interpreters; engaging family and community; the style and approach of mental health providers; advocacy; and continuity of care.

We investigated feared social situations in individuals with social anxiety disorder from different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. The sample included 247 African Americans, 158 Latinos, and 533 non-Latino Whites diagnosed with social anxiety disorder within the past 12 months from the integrated Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Studies data set. After randomly splitting the full sample, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis with half of the sample to determine the structure of feared social situations in a more diverse sample than has been used in previous studies. We found evidence for a model consisting of three feared social domains: performance/public speaking, social interaction, and observational. We then conducted a confirmatory factor analysis on the remaining half of the sample to examine whether this factor structure varied significantly between the race-ethnic groups. Analyses revealed an adequate fit of this model across all three race-ethnic groups, suggesting invariance of the factor structure between the study groups. Broader cultural contexts within which these findings are relevant are discussed, along with important implications for comprehensive, culturally sensitive assessment of social anxiety.

A cross-cultural team including a U.S.-trained clinical cross-cultural psychologist and two Turkish psychiatrists conducted research on a set of five trauma treatment psychotherapy groups for adult women survivors of sexual abuse in Ankara, Turkey. Based upon observational comparisons between trauma treatment groups in U.S. and Turkish settings, the team developed an approach to assist in adaptation of treatment methods from one cultural setting to another. This is a preliminary effort to develop a conceptual tool to focus the attention of therapists on salient dimensions of culture that may influence the psychotherapy process. This article describes six possible dimensions: (a) relational/individual self; (b) situationalism/universalism; (c) high/low power differential; (cc) high/low gender differential; (d) internal/external control; (e) emotional expressivity/containment; and (f) short-term/long-term time orientation. Comparative cultural examples from trauma psychotherapy group field notes illustrate the use of the tool.

Anecdotal reports have linked cannabis use to violence in some remote Australian Aboriginal communities. We examine the relationship between cannabis use and presentations to local clinics for violence-related trauma at a population level. As part of a larger study, estimates of cannabis and alcohol use status were obtained for 264 randomly selected individuals aged 14–42. These estimates were collected from Aboriginal health workers and respected community informants using a previously validated approach. Clinic records for the sample were audited for physical trauma presentations between January 2004 and June 2006. One in 3 individuals (n = 88/264) presented to the clinic with physical trauma. Of these, the majority (65.9%, n = 58/88) had at least one presentation that was violence-related. Nearly 2 in every 3 of the total presentations for trauma following violence (n = 40/63) involved the use of a weapon. Hunting tools were most often used, followed by wooden or rock implements. Individuals who reported any current cannabis use were nearly 4 times more likely than nonusers to present at least once for violent trauma after adjusting for current alcohol use, age, and sex (OR = 3.8, 95% CI [1.5, 9.8]). Aboriginal individuals in these remote communities experience high rates of physical trauma and violence, often involving weapons. A comprehensive study is needed to explore the association between cannabis and violence. At the same time, an investment in local programmes is needed to address cannabis use and underlying risk factors for substance use and for violence.

Brua is an Afro-Caribbean religion and healing tradition from the southern part of the former Netherlands Antilles. Like other Caribbean healing traditions, it plays a significant role in shaping how individuals experience and express disorders which Western health professionals consider to require psychiatric care. Because little has been published on Brua, and because patients from Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao are often reluctant to discuss their commitment to this tradition, they are often misdiagnosed and either over- or undertreated by biomedically trained health professionals. The present paper provides a review of the literature on Brua and its relation to psychiatry. A systematic search was carried out in PubMed, the Ovid database, Google Scholar, and the historical literature. Our search yielded 35 texts on Brua, including three peer-reviewed scientific papers and eight academic theses. From those texts Brua emerges as a holistic patchwork of creolized beliefs and practices which are considered to be both cause and remedy for a wide variety of ailments. Despite the fact that tension between the Brua discourse and Western-oriented psychiatric practice is significant, adherence to Brua does not seem to cause much patient delay in help-seeking. However, belief in Brua as a possible source of mental and physical complaints, as well as patients’ frequent recourse to Brua practices, including the use of hallucinogens, may affect the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders.