In honour cultures, the group’s social image and reputation are central to its identity and individuals (especially women and girls) within the group are expected to uphold them. A qualitative interview study was conducted to examine understandings of honour and the implications for identity processes in a sample of 18 second-generation British South Asian young adults. The data were analysed using qualitative thematic analysis through the conceptual lens of psychological coherence from identity process theory. The following four themes were developed: (1) understandings of honour; (2) honour entrusted to women; (3) threats to psychological coherence; and (4) strategies for managing psychological coherence. The findings indicate that the competing demands of honour expectations and Britishness can undermine psychological coherence. British South Asian young adults may attempt to safeguard feelings of psychological coherence by rejecting rigid behavioural expectations, by concealing aspects of their lives to navigate dual cultural pressures, and by redefining the content of their identity to resist honour expectations. Psychotherapeutic interventions should support clients to elect adaptive, effective, and sustainable coping strategies.
Purpose: Initiatives to increase racial equity and ethnic diversity within the clinical psychology profession in the United Kingdom (UK) have been on the agenda for at least three decades (Davenhill et al., 1989). Despite this, available statistics show that within England and Wales, individuals from racially minoritised backgrounds make up only 9.3% of qualified clinical psychologists (Office for National Statistics, 2018). It is widely evidenced that individuals from racially minoritised backgrounds face multiple, complex, and significant systemic barriers when attempting to access a career in clinical psychology (Health Education England, 2022; Kinouani et al., 2016; National Union of Students, 2019a). In an attempt to level the playing field, the North East Clinical Psychology Training Programme collaborated to develop a regional mentoring scheme for aspiring clinical psychologists from racially minoritised backgrounds. The aim of this evaluation was to explore mentees’ experiences of engaging with the scheme. Design: Five mentees from racially minoritised backgrounds participated in semi-structured interviews conducted virtually via Microsoft Teams and thematic analysis was used as the method of analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Results: The analysis yielded four key themes: processing racialised experiences and identities; ‘seeing people in the profession who look like me’; increased self-belief and feeling empowered; and feelings of discomfort, fear, and anxiety. Originality: This article is one of the first to explore mentees’ experiences of engaging in a mentoring scheme for aspiring clinical psychologists from racially minoritised backgrounds and provides critical reflections and insights around the function, meaning, and benefits of widening access schemes in clinical psychology. It highlights the critical importance of incorporating the lived experiences and voices of racially minoritised aspiring psychologists in the design and delivery of widening access schemes as well as the challenges of tackling racism in ‘wicked’ (Came & Griffith, 2017), colonial, and Eurocentric structures and systems. It highlights the importance of ensuring mentoring schemes sit under a wider ecology of structural and systemic change in clinical psychology, rather than as stand-alone, tokenistic gestures of advancing equity.
This article reports and reflects on a unique initiative in psychotherapy research: the establishment of a research group that is led by a concern and commitment to respond to an indigenous agenda in health and, more specifically, the psychological therapies. The article discusses the vision of the group, and its initial work, set against the background of the politics of research, doing so firstly by the authors introducing ourselves and our positionality. The group refers to Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, as tangata Whenua (people of the land) and Pasific people (Pasifika) as tangata Moana (people of the sea [the Pacific Ocean]); and, drawing on our commitment to honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) and guided by Te Ara Tika (the right path) with regard to ethics, discuss our focus on research that serves underserved populations.
It is becoming ever more obvious that many people fear rapidly developing artificial intelligence (AI) for various reasons, such as its supposed superiority as far as accessing, processing, and manipulating information is concerned, as well as its adaptability in the workplace, which many fear would lead to the replacement of most human beings in the employment market. Others fear indications that AI will be harnessed on the battlefield as robotic soldiers. This article aims to dispel some of these fears by elaborating on the differences between AI and human beings which, if understood adequately, would (or should) dispel such anxieties. The most obvious difference in question is the fact that AI (for example ChatGPT) is dependent on being equipped with a vast database and access to the internet on which it draws to come up with answers to questions, which it formulates predictively through pattern recognition. However, unlike humans, it lacks direct access to experiential reality in perceptual, spatiotemporal terms. Furthermore, the issues of communication with AI, the uncanny, self-consciousness, as well as of the unconscious, are discussed as possible demarcation criteria regarding humanity versus AI. Throughout, the psychology and psychotherapeutic implications of these considerations are pointed out. A distinction is drawn between AI and the globalist neo-fascists (the ‘Davos elites’), who demonstrably intend using AI to control ordinary people. The questions of the political and therapeutic implications (such as self-empowerment) of the rise of AI are discussed in terms of Lacan’s theory of discourse. The fear of AI finds exemplary expression in science fiction, in the guise of imagined AI-machines which might attempt to exterminate their human creators, as has been imagined in Moore’s Battlestar Galactica and Cameron’s Terminator films. It is argued that, while these fictional scenarios may be exaggerated, there are other legitimate grounds to fear (or distrust) AI, such as its tendency to ‘hallucinate’, and its capacity to create human dependence on its ‘counselling’, which has been shown to lead to suicide and psychotic episodes on the part of some individuals. In conclusion, given the rapid development of AI, recent developments—such as, paradigmatically, Anthropic’s Claude disclosing its own mode of being-in-space, in contrast with time-bound humans, as well as AI models embracing religion and threatening humans—are examined, with an emphasis on commensurate psychotherapy.
In the context of Singapore’s multicultural society and dual legal system governing marriages in the general population and amongst Muslims, this article investigates the causes of divorce in Singapore. Based on a quantitative survey of 136 divorced Singaporeans, this article reports commonly cited reasons for seeking divorce amongst Singapore citizens. Two factors leading to divorce, as identified by survey participants, were adultery (25%) and difficulties in/with communication (14%). Results from this study may assist counsellors who are working with Singaporeans experiencing difficult marriages and contemplating divorce; as well as policy considerations to restructure the Court system to better serve litigants by bringing together all family members related to the divorce. The research is framed with reference to the introduction in 2024 of the divorce by mutual agreement scheme which was codified under the Women’s Charter 1961 (revised 2022).
This is a theoretical and political position article that argues that contemporary psychotherapy cannot be understood, practiced, or ethically sustained outside the global context of hyper-capitalist violence. Moving beyond the era of ‘pop psychotherapy’, centred on individual adjustment, gratification, and performance, the author claims that the current epidemic of psychic suffering is significantly related to neoliberal, colonial, and techno-authoritarian forms of power. The genocide perpetrated in Gaza is addressed not as an isolated geopolitical event, but as a paradigmatic revelation of a cultural system founded on the erasure of otherness, dehumanisation, and the normalisation of violence. Drawing on critical psychoanalytic, philosophical, and political perspectives, the article challenges the illusion of clinical neutrality and argues that every psychotherapeutic relationship is inherently political. This article contributes to psychotherapy scholarship by situating clinical practice within contemporary debates on social suffering, decolonial theory, and critical mental health, and by arguing that psychotherapy cannot be understood as a neutral, purely individual practice under conditions of structural violence. Psychotherapy is proposed as a space of resistance, where non-violent, egalitarian, and democratic forms of interhuman relations can be imagined and practiced. In the age of genocide, the author contends, psychotherapy is called to move beyond purely adaptive and depoliticised functions and to reclaim its subversive potential: to testify, to refuse erasure, and to stand on the side of the human.
Research shows that the role of parental figures in mixed race identity formation is crucial. Yet, the current literature focuses predominantly on the experiences and roles of White mothers, with limited research on the experiences of Black mothers. Drawing on data from an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) study, this article explores the experiences of nine Black mothers raising mixed race children in the UK. Findings revealed two overarching challenges. The first related to the mother–child dyad. Participants described feeling distinct from their mixed race children, identified the difficulties in aiding mixed race identity development, and referred to concerns about how society would perceive them. Other reported narratives stemmed from experiences within wider society. Participants encountered microaggressions, spoke of the negative assumptions that they had faced, and often experienced questioning of their legitimacy as mothers. These findings highlight the emotional impact of disrupted mirroring between Black mothers and their mixed race children, where physical and cultural differences may interfere with mutual recognition and connection between mother and child. In sum, this study underscores the need to place Black mothers’ voices at the heart of research investigating the experience of raising mixed race children.
Psychological practice makes many claims for emancipatory potential; and as such becomes an unquestionable good. Yet history teaches that all unquestionable goods pose a special class of risk, in the exertion of subterranean forms of social regulation and control. In this article we demonstrate how, even in purportedly successful therapeutic encounters guided by ethically minded clinicians, dangers of coercion exist—as psychological modalities unwittingly enact political givens. As such the field of psychological practices produces a kind of therapeutic sensibility which has the following features: enacting modernity’s centring of the isolated self, thereby reenforcing one of the key features of contemporary society—an interiorism which renders individuals into ideological isolates; depoliticising a subject’s suffering, a depoliticisation which erases cultural awareness of the implicitly interest-driven ideology underlying therapeutic treatment; or contrarily, becoming an instrument for the complete politicisation of identity without subject; an expression of the commodification of social identity and the reductive objectification, and the missing of, the subject; offering a socially sanctioned means of regulating emotional expression, and thereby pathologising socially and politically threatening affective states. What is called for, we contend, is a critical and dialectical approach to emancipatory potential of psychological practice.
Amid a deeply divided political and social landscape, racially minoritised therapists face unique challenges in inter-racial therapy. As communities grow more diverse but also more divided, helping professions, including counselling and psychotherapy, must critically reflect on their positionality when engaging with difference. Understanding how ‘difference’ is experienced by both therapist and client is vital. This study draws on critical race theory (CRT) to explore the complexities of difference, power, and identity in therapeutic practice. It examines how intersecting identities and socio-political, historical, and cultural contexts shape the lived experiences of racially minoritised therapists. Using a single case approach, the study critically reflects on inter-racial therapy settings and emphasises the need for mental health professionals to adapt and integrate inter-racial therapy practices within broader social justice frameworks. Such an approach can help redress power imbalances and challenge the racism and discrimination that racially minoritised therapists continue to experience within therapeutic contexts.
This article examines how decolonisation is increasingly being taken up within contemporary psychotherapy, and how it can become absorbed into professional discourse in ways that leave underlying relations of power intact. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, liberation psychology, and decolonial interventions within psychoanalysis and psychiatry, the article situates what is often presented as universal psychotherapy within Western epistemologies that continue to shape what counts as knowledge, legitimacy, ethics, and care. It asks what becomes possible or impossible when psychotherapy claims decolonial intent while remaining organised through neutrality, universality, and professional authority. Focusing on professional status, epistemic extraction, and everyday clinical practice, the article argues that decolonial work is frequently mobilised in ways that protect institutions from transformation rather than exposing the conditions through which power is reproduced. By centring the work of Frantz Fanon, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Lara Sheehi, Avgi Saketopoulou, Omnia Shakry, and Stefania Pandolfo, the article challenges the assumption that care is inherently ethical. Instead, it argues that ethical practice requires an encounter with grief, historical reality, relational accountability, and the willingness to risk being changed. The article invites psychotherapists, particularly those positioned within whiteness, to approach decolonisation not as professional competency or moral identity, but as an ongoing ethical, political, and spiritual praxis. Psychotherapy is approached not as a neutral site of healing, but as a contested terrain in which colonial relations may be reproduced, resisted, or rendered visible.
This article argues that breakdowns of symbolisation in clinical work with structurally fragile patients illuminate a structural homology in contemporary political life—that is, a patterned similarity in how shared symbolic space narrows and can sometimes be repaired. Drawing on psychoanalytic, mentalisation-based, and intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP) traditions, I conceptualise misunderstanding not as mere error but as a predictable risk when affect overwhelms the capacity to symbolise. After defining symbolisation, mentalisation, thresholds, and authoritarian drift—and distinguishing the latter from populism and fascistisation—I examine three anonymised clinical vignettes as process-scenes. The vignettes show how somatic enactment, countertransference reactivity, and institutional proceduralisation can either foreclose or restore symbolic function. I then translate these micro-processes into a macro-level account of humiliation politics, disinformation, collective nostalgia, epistemic injustice, and democratic backsliding. The macro argument is power-sensitive and materially mediated: symbolic degradation is unevenly distributed, and is intensified where racialised, gendered, classed, disabled, migrant, or otherwise marginalised subjects are treated as less credible or more disposable, while media and administrative systems reward speed over reflection. The argument is not that the clinic causes politics, but that both domains can be read through homologous mechanisms of symbolic contraction and repair. A further section addresses a central tension of contemporary service cultures: how short-term therapy and psychometrics can either support containment or reproduce managerial short-termism and de-subjectification. I conclude that co-symbolising dialogue is both clinical technique and civic practice. To protect symbolising capacity is to protect the conditions of shared reality: time, reciprocity, tolerance of ambiguity, and institutions that reward repair rather than performance.
I locate myself in space and time as a child of the Windrush generation, born in the UK in the 1960s. Erica McInnis (2018), on understanding African beingness and becoming, explains that within the diaspora I am ‘born yah’, and therefore vulnerable to issues around belonging and identity. My decision in 2020 to train as a therapist coincides with the desire to excavate my identity, long buried under the white gaze, and the double severing of enslavement and post-war migration, and to untangle my miseducation. I begin to learn how to be, rather than simply survive in white-dominated spaces. As a student bereavement counsellor and a bereaved therapist, I examine my relationship with separation and loss, and how that might manifest in the clinical encounter. As a descendant of enslaved people, I have a specific diasporic longing to belong: to rest in a place I have never known; to go back through ‘the door of no return’ (Brand, 2011). I conclude that belonging might not be to a geographical place, but a state of knowledge. My psychic journey is the cartography of diaspora: I have no map so must draw my own, develop a grammar, and rewrite my script from assembled fragments. With a sounder foundation, I begin to integrate African wisdom into my practice and praxis. Beingness and longing is embedded in my psyche: I embrace the state of (be)longing as a potential route to diasporic integration.
A reflective case study is presented on the creation and implementation of online group therapy sessions for the LGBTIQS+/LGBTS, or queer community in Ghana. As the two mental health practitioners who initiated this project, we clarify how its objectives relate to our professional code of ethics. The introduction of an anti-LGBT+ bill to Ghana’s parliament has contributed to a political and cultural context of escalating hostility towards queer people in a society where queerness is already stigmatised. We consider how we established our virtual groups, referencing the needs expressed, and how we responded with a resource-focused and affirming brief therapy model. We highlight the considerable constraints and challenges faced by participants and the adaptations that became necessary. Feedback from participants demonstrated that, for those who were able to access sessions regularly, both the resource offering and the space with community were appreciated, and the group therapy process was valued.
This article aims to show why African histories and African philosophies matter, both in our personal lives and in therapeutic practice, through the telling of my own experience. In this article I recount my ongoing personal journey to reclaim and reconnect with my African heritage, by revisiting my father’s African history through the lens of the African philosophies of Ubuntu and Sankofa. Prompted by discovering my father’s writings from the 1960s, when he was a university student, I learn more about his story and the African philosophies of Ubuntu and Sankofa. The Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu centres our interrelatedness and common humanity: a person is a person through other persons. The West African philosophy of Sankofa tells us not to be afraid to go back and retrieve that of value which has been lost or forgotten, and to bring it with us on the future journey. On my own Sankofa journey I go back to revisit my writing from the 1980s, when I was a university student, discovering the connections with my father’s writing from the 1960s. I reassess my earlier understandings through the lens of Ubuntu and come to recognise how the spirit of Ubuntu permeates my father’s writing and was absent from my own. I reflect on how my personal Sankofa journey has enriched my life. I consider how African philosophies can be integrated into therapeutic practice and invite the therapy profession to embrace African histories and philosophies. I consider the need for more African histories and invite Africans to write authentic histories, to honour the past and guide the future.
While the impact of separation on children of migrant parents who are fostered or sent back home has received significant attention (e.g., research, documentaries, books), including through emerging terms such as farming (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002), the experiences of the mothers who make this difficult choice are often absent from the narrative. The studies so far have been focused on the child. However, the perspectives of the women making these decisions remain largely underrepresented. I was curious to find the mother’s voice. This study utilises reflective conversations to explore the motivations and emotional realities of African/Ghanaian mothers in England across three generations (ages 83, 62, and 38) who have sent their children (aged six months to 14 years) back to Africa while remaining in England. The focus is on understanding the ‘why’ behind these decisions, including perceived educational advantages, the availability of familial care, and cultural proximity, alongside the mothers’ honest reflections on these experiences. These reflections are situated within broader discussions of care, culture, and identity in transnational African families (Coe, 2011; Horton, 2009). The findings contribute to the growing body of work exploring the emotional geographies of transnational parenting and the politics of care in diasporic communities.
