Interlinguistic and intercultural mediation in psychological care interviews with asylum seekers and refugees: Handling emotions in the narration of traumatic experience

Abstract

This paper presents the results of our fieldwork with an NGO in the Valencian Community (Spain) that temporarily takes in asylum seekers and refugees (ASRs), especially from Arab countries, Eastern Europe and West Africa, and provides them with basic services, including psychological assistance. Following a qualitative methodology, interviews were conducted to collect the opinions and experiences of psychologists and interlinguistic and intercultural mediators who work with ASRs. We have observed that the aspects related to the different conceptions of mental illness (for example, the effect of spiritual entities), which can be decisive in the clinical interviews between psychiatrists and economic and social immigrants, play a somewhat secondary role in the clinical interviews. In this type of interview, cultural differences related to the patterns of communicative interaction between psychologist and patient have been seen to be particularly problematic, especially with regard to the expression of emotions during the narration of traumatic events suffered by ASRs. The initial results of the study demand an in-depth reflection on the communicative initiatives that mediators can put into practice in these interventions. Specifically, they call for a closer examination of the communicative initiatives related not only to the interpretation or explanation of the cultural differences observed in emotional expressions, but also the verbal and non-verbal strategies that mediators can deploy to prevent the blockages that cultural differences of an emotional nature can generate in the narration of the traumatic experiences of ASRs. This paper makes some proposals for action in this regard.