Abstract
Mental health interpreters play a crucial role in clinical support for refugees by providing a bridge between client and clinician. Yet research on interpreters’ experiences and perspectives is remarkably sparse. In this study, semi-structured interviews with mental health interpreters explored the experience of working in clinical settings with refugees. We conducted inductive analysis informed by a reflexive thematic analytic approach. Our analysis identifies interpreters’ pleasure in being part of people’s recovery, offset by the pain of misrecognition by clinicians that signals low self-worth and invisibility. Three sites of tension that create dilemmas for interpreters are identified: maintaining professional boundaries, managing privately shared information, and recognizing cultural norms. These findings are discussed in terms of the implications for clinicians working with interpreters, with a focus on the importance of a relationship of trust founded on recognition of the interpreters’ role and the unique challenges they face.
Highlights
Mental health interpreters play a crucial role in clinical support for refugee populations (Priebe et al, 2016), some clinicians working in this area continue to believe that interpreters should provide only word-forword translation in the therapeutic relationship between client and clinician (Engstrom et al, 2010; Hsieh et al, 2010; Mofrad & Webster, 2012)
The study was conducted at a United Kingdom NHS Psychology-based service for refugees and asylum seekers with a primary diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
When the interpreter feels constrained in sharing knowledge and experience, this may present a substantial barrier to the therapeutic alliance and, in some cases, may even inadvertently compromise the validity of clinical information relayed to the clinician
Summary
There is considerable research on the experiences of refugees accessing mental health services in the West, including in Europe (Maier & Straub, 2011; Markova & Sandal, 2016; Posselt et al, 2017), the United States (Miller et al, 2005; Morris et al, 2009; Shannon et al, 2015), and Australasia (De Anstiss & Ziaian, 2010; Valibhoy et al, 2017) that attests to the importance of interpreters in facilitating access. Regardless of the explanatory framework, what is clear is that refugees themselves express fear about being misunderstood and offered unhelpful advice and support from professionals of different cultural or experiential backgrounds (Behnia, 2003; Bernardes et al, 2011; De Anstiss & Ziaian, 2010; Kerbage et al, 2020; Majumder et al, 2015), and have greater confidence in expressing themselves and being understood in the presence of an interpreter (Hadziabdic & Hjelm, 2014)
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