This book delivers comprehensive insight into therapeutic relationships with refugees and asylum seekers and the complexities and barriers practitioners often experience. The guide is made up of four parts, each containing chapters that include definitions, case studies, and theoretical and practice perspectives, concluding with activities to reinforce learning. These make the guide essential reading for social work practitioners and students alike. Each of the four parts and chapters focus on strong evidence-based interventions supported by relevant psychological and sociological theories, in particular, theories of identity and resilience underpinned by trauma, interpersonal, and narrative approaches.
In a very specific and complex area of practice, the guide has a focus on therapeutic psychological knowledge and sociological understandings to clearly outline a framework that demonstrates case management principles, knowledge of psychosocial assessment, and effectiveness in grassroots practice. Students, early career social workers, and more experienced practitioners will find the guide useful in navigating what can often feel enigmatic through the application of a holistic, psychosocial framework and useful suggestions for interventions in their practice.
The guide unpacks phenomenological experiences of asylum seekers and refugees that are not shaped or defined by individual ethnicity, country of origin, religion, gender, or their journey from home to host. They are presented as uniform, complex experiences of trauma and settlement that impact on the sense of belonging of a diverse group of individuals. This is demonstrated throughout the guide’s narrative within the case studies, linked with the message of hope, building on strengths, and resilience.
What is not clearly articulated is the authors’ attempt to distinguish between therapeutic practices with asylum seekers and refugees and therapeutic practices more generally. The two seem to be considered as one. Adding to the psychosocial lens of practice, the anonymity of language, home country, age, and religion of the cases presented left the reviewer with more questions than answers. A deeper insight into the importance of how language and culture contribute to sense making and meaning would exemplify the complexities and challenges asylum seekers and refugees experience in settlement when addressing stigma and recovery in the host country. Particularly, when working with interpreters, grasping constructs of psychological awareness, and the understanding of self and experience are needed and these were lacking in the narratives.
Although, the guide raises host country acculturation, the personal sociopolitical controversaries that may be part of refugees’ lived experience are ambiguously addressed. Barriers and difficulties may be masked through adapting to western cultural practices and perspectives of acculturation and help-seeking behaviours. That being said, the guide tactfully and skillfully navigates experiences and complex, profoundly different home cultures, and adaptability to host. This is done by identifying the personal meaning and journey of refugees and asylum seekers and their lived experiences contributing to current psychosocial understandings in a new and unknown world. This highlights the complexities faced by therapeutic practices in this field.
The guide walks us through the initial assessment phase of unpacking and defining the refugee phenomena, supported by leading researchers in the field ensuring a more grounded, holistic practice found in the centre of any good evidence-based approach of intervention. Additionally, social work values of social justice, self-determination, and empowerment, and encouraging strength and hope are emphasised. In Chapter 8 the authors bring together ethical, person-centred practices and therapeutic purpose and context when working in situations that are complex. These complexities occur at the macro level, for example host political ideologies, and the micro level of the lived experiences of asylum seekers and refugees’ journeys across two cultures.
The guide is written with the practitioner in mind, augmenting case management practices and implementation of interventions, providing a deeper understanding of interpersonal experiences and phenomena. The book will appeal to experienced practitioners in social work, psychology, and wider human services and to students in these fields engaging a range of sociological and psychological understandings of the human experience, making sense of distress and contemporary discourses when working in direct practice with asylum seekers and refugees.