Training

The association Diversa/mente realizes training courses, seminars, study days, conferences, concerning ethnopsychiatry, anthropology and transcultural clinic, addressed to different professional profiles (social and health workers, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, educators, teachers, cultural mediators...) in agreement or in partnership with public and private bodies.
Every year the Association also organises thematic refresher meetings for reflection and debate on ethnopsychiatric and anthropological issues, aimed at all members.

Why ethnoclinical training?

Dealing with the life needs and the treatment of the suffering of migrants places the therapist - as well as the social worker, the educator or the teacher - in front of complex and unprecedented situations that require, in order to be adequately understood and treated, a rethinking of our explanatory categories and of the methodologies used.

Appropriate tools are needed to think about the cultural difference, to understand the different languages through which suffering is structured and expressed, to implement intervention methodologies able to intercept the demand of the foreign person and activate his/her resources and resilience.

However, it is not enough to introduce a generic cultural variable to be added to the diagnosis and treatment models normally used. In fact, a superficial use of the cultural component, often identified with rigid representations of diversity, does not improve our understanding of the life paths and difficulties of foreigners. On the contrary, it can lead to interpreting complex behaviours as mere manifestations of the culture of belonging, preventing the identification of the multiple factors underlying them (social factors, cultural transformations and mestizaje, specifically personal factors...), and reducing the transcultural clinic to a paralysing oscillation between a "cultural truth" and a "psychopathological truth".  (Beneduce, 2007).

What is needed is a discipline capable of grasping the relationships, which are never deterministic, between cultural and social elements and subjective psychic functioning; a discipline capable of bringing into dialogue the different symbolic universes in which pain and psychic illness can be thought of.
Ethnopsychiatry - in its various forms - seems to us to be a particularly suitable reference model for dealing with this complexity.

Email: diversamente.bologna@gmail.com