Islamic faith as a facilitator for accessing counselling: the experience of three Kuwaiti clients

ABSTRACT

This paper draws upon qualitative research with three Kuwaiti counselling clients to explore how they negotiated accessing counselling in the context of their communities, culture and faith. Contrary to the prevailing view in the literature portraying Islamic faith as a barrier to help-seeking in mental health, these clients view their faith as an important facilitator for accessing formal help. In particular, participants distinguished faith from culture and appealed to sacred scriptures to demonstrate the convergence of Muslim values with help-seeking in relation to psychological distress. This paper offers an original and timely discussion of one aspect of the potential interface of Islamic faith and counselling, while acknowledging the limitations of the small self-selected sample from which the findings are drawn.

KEYWORDS:

• Counselling
• Islam
• facilitator
• barrier
• help-seeking
• Kuwait

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

We thank the three participants for sharing their stories and contributing to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mounira Al-Dousari is a Kuwaiti PhD student in Counselling Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a Lecturer in Counselling Psychology at Kuwait University, Kuwait. Her main research focus is on the experience of counselling in Kuwait from the perspective of clients and counsellors. She also has an interest in how faith, particularly Islam, and collectivist culture manifest in the therapeutic space.

Seamus Prior is a Senior Lecturer on the Counselling and Psychotherapy programmes at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is a psychodynamic therapist with a practice base in community mental health settings and private practice. His research interests include the client’s experience of counselling, counselling training, and the intersection of culture, faith and therapy.

Notes

1 The first author is the principal researcher who undertook the Kuwaiti research. The second author supervised the research and assisted with the analysis.