Multilingual mental health clients are different from monolingual clients, but they are not always treated differently in practice. If we ignore the presence and potential of multilingualism, we risk not only overlooking our multilingual clients’ identities and forms of emotional expression but also perpetuating inequalities in access to our services.
It may seem rather artificial to bracket off multilingualism, examining it as a discrete phenomenon but multilingualism is all too often subsumed into the category of culture. Culture is a huge and important topic. But in order to preserve some airtime for multilingualism, it can be useful to examine it separately in a training context before integrating the learning more holistically into practice.

LEARNING OUTCOMES
This resource will help you to:

• Become more aware of the ways in which multilingual clients’ and monolingual clients’ experiences are different and the relevance of those differences to mental health issues and therapeutic practice
• Apply knowledge about linguistic justice, agency, privilege and power to psychological practice
• Become more confident at working effectively with an interpreter and attending to the shifting dynamics of power in interpreter-mediated therapy
• Become more confident in applying a multilingual therapeutic frame and using the resource of a client’s and/or a practitioner’s multilingualism as a therapeutic asset

​The films tell the story of a therapist in training called Frankie. It shows how he nearly fails to qualify and how the skills he acquired disappear when two of his own cases and a friend’s case challenge him so much that his world seems to be turned inside-out.
The cases in the films draw on amalgamated and anonymised real cases that illustrate cross-disciplinary theories and research findings about multilingualism from mental health studies, psychotherapy and applied linguistics. We wish to thank Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele for his specialist advice and The Paul Hamlyn Foundation for funding this project.
In some instances we have allowed ourselves a little licence with therapeutic principles of practice in order to present a coherent narrative that incorporates the learning objectives. Actors have been cast across boundaries of ethnicity to reflect our cross-disciplinary and cross-practice approach. The films were shot during the Covid-19 pandemic according to industry guidelines.