Keeping Therapy White?: Psychotherapy Trainings and Equal Opportunities

Abstract

This paper looks at the issue of equal opportunities for ethnic minorities as it relates to psychoanalytic psychotherapy trainings. It reports on a survey of trainings and equal opportunity policies and argues that all training organisations should examine their practices in this area and consider the adoption of formal policies aimed at the elimination of possible discrimination against ethnic minority candidates who are otherwise well qualified to train as psychotherapists.

Conceptualizing cultural and gendered identities in psychological therapies

“…Part of that task involves creating institutional climates and processes that facilitate this outlook, and clearly our analysis has implications for what should be taught in trainings, and how, and to whom -in this we echo Gordon's (1993) In making such demands we do not underestimate the personal energy and commitment to change that such initiatives involve. We are well aware of how institutions resist and contain change, and, as we have argued, longstanding patterns of inequality -such as those indicated by the exclusion of black people or devaluation of minority cultural heritages in psychological treatments -are unlikely to be amenable to immediate change.…”

“…Similar problems have been identified within British psychotherapy selection and training programmes (Gordon 1993) and research contexts (Wheeler 1994;Ullah 1996).…”

Sanjhe Rang/Shared colours, shared lives: a multicultural approach to mental health practice

“…However there are few trained minority ethnic therapists, indicating the intersecting obstacles of institutionalised racism and class inequalities mobilised in gaining admission onto elitist training programmes (Littlewood, 1992;Gordon, 1993). The use of interpreters has also sometimes been put forward, but again this can only be a limited approach.…”

“…This positions black people as bearers of 'race' and cultural 'difference', with white people correspondingly typically portrayed as devoid of colour/'culture'. As a key current within modern European thought and ingredient of therapy, we should remember that psychoanalytic discourse (as the dominant therapeutic framework) has positioned non-white people as Other, and psychoanalysts from Freud onwards (1930) have used people of non-European origin, and their cultures and religions, as the template for the white masculine subject's infantile, primitive and savage self (Dalal, 1988;Littlewood, 1992;Gordon, 1993Gordon, , 2001. Black people in Britain are thus caught between models of inferiority and deficit, and within the discursive complex of either normalised absence (i.e.…”

Working in the Mother‐tongue: First Language Provision and Cultural Matching in Inter‐cultural Therapy

“…Conversely, other critiques have pointed out that patients from such groups are often portrayed as too lacking in some essential quality such as 'psychological mindedness' or 'verbal sophistication' to benefit from such treatments and are channelled towards physical and pharmacological treatments, including enforced hospitalization, ECT, sedation and tranquillization, often under Section of the Mental Health Act. Within these complementary critiques, the absence of ethnic minority patients in Departments of Psychotherapy and Clinical Psychology, the paucity of black therapists and the inadequacy of training programmes in addressing issues of race and culture, as well as the lack of research considering these variables, are frequently highlighted (Campling 1989;Gordon 1993).…”