The talking cure – building the core skills and the confidence of counsellors and psychotherapists to work effectively with multilingual patients through training and supervision

Increasing numbers of multilingual people seek counselling and psychotherapy in a system that is rooted in a monolingual ideology. Despite these numbers, there is very little training for therapists and counsellors which equips them to treat multilingual patients. The absence of multilingualism in therapy and counselling training is strange given that therapeutic treatment is known as the “talking cure”. Research with therapists and counsellors about their beliefs and behaviour with multilingual patients (Stevens & Holland, 2008; Costa & Dewaele, 2012) revealed that therapists were anxious about their ability to work with multilingual patients. Research also included recommendations that counselling courses pay more attention to languages, identity and difference (Georgiadou, 2014). Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service, a small NGO based in the UK, developed and delivered training for counsellors and therapists and culturally and linguistically sensitive supervision groups for counsellors and therapists working in their local NHS Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Service. They also developed and deliver a module on culturally and linguistically sensitive supervision for IAPT supervision courses. An informal evaluation confirms findings in (Bager-Charleson et al., 2017) that after the training and supervision, the confidence and multilingual awareness of counsellors and therapists improved and they felt able to use multilingualism as a therapeutic asset in the treatment of trauma and other presenting issues. This paper will include examples from the original research, the training and the evaluations, while illustrating a model of cross- disciplinary research which impacts directly on mental health practice and the reduction of health inequalities