Abstract
In recent years, the number of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK has been increasing. Given the nature of their forced migration and current hostile policies inimical to their wellbeing, a proportion of these individuals will require support from statutory mental health services, including but not limited to psychological intervention. Asylum seekers and refugees may present with a number of complex needs to services, although services may struggle to engage with these needs or fully understand them. Consequently, this doctoral thesis aimed to add to the literature around issues of both understanding and engaging refugee and asylum seeker clients.
Part one of this portfolio aims to synthesise a variety of literature concerning unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) to better understand their needs. The paper uses the power threat meaning framework (PTMF) to do this and argues for its utility in providing integrative and holistic understanding of these vulnerable young people as a helpful alternative to psychiatric diagnosis. Paper two presents a qualitative empirical paper that investigated the experiences of practitioner psychologists in building trusting therapeutic relationships with asylum-seekers and refugees. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, the findings suggested that psychologists were required to engage in various types of extra-therapeutic work, both inside and outside the therapy room, to differentiate themselves from their clients’ negative experiences of the past. However, the degree to which these tasks could be performed were limited by the service structures they worked within.