Blog

Ensuring a client’s voice can be fully expressed is essential to the therapeutic endeavour. Yet for refugees engaged with UK mental health services, the channel of communication can be too readily closed. As we mark World Mental Health Day 2023, Refugee Council therapy service manager Jude Boyles reflects on two frustrating phonecalls from the past fortnight, highlighting the urgent need for mental health practitioners to be trained to work with interpreters.

Connection and community are critical to mental health, and often missing in the lives of recently resettled refugees. Jude Boyles, the manager of a Refugee Council therapy service and co-editor of a new book on groupwork with refugees, shares her encounter with one Afghan client who struggled to communicate that it was not counselling she needed for her depression – but the chance to meet other women with similar questions and struggles.