Intercultural trauma-centred psychotherapy and the application of the EMDR method

Abstract

According to the micro-census of 2014, the number of people with a migration background in 2013 was at least 16.5 million (Federal Statistics Office 2014), thus representing 20.5 % of the total population of Germany. Behind a supposedly uniform "population group" are in reality many heterogeneous groups - people from different countries, who migrated in different generations and with different levels of education, residence status and socio-economic backgrounds. Since the 1990s, barriers to and within the social and health systems have been observed, hindering an equal quality of care for people with a migration background. One such pattern which has been observed is that people with a migration background usually make less frequent use of health services (Lindert et al. 2008). Various different aspects could be held responsible for this situation, such as a lack of information on the healthcare system, legal factors pertaining to residence status (Grüsser and Becker 1999), communication difficulties and "cultural" misunderstandings (Wohlfart and Zaumseil 2006; Schouler-Ocak 2011) - all of which can prevent or delay people finding their way into the system.