Birkbeck Counselling Centre Annual Lecture: Psychological Therapies in a Multilingual World
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Birkbeck Counselling Centre Annual Lecture: Psychological Therapies in a Multilingual World
Dr Beverly Costa and Professor Jean-Marc Deweale (Birkbeck)
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Room MAL B20
Just over one million people cannot speak English well enough to access psychological therapy in English according to the data from the 2021 UK Census. Furthermore, many patients and therapists in the UK communicate together in English as a lingua franca when it is not their first language. Despite these statistics, the topics of multilingualism and interpreter-mediated psychological therapies are seldom covered in the core training of psychological therapists or clinical supervisors.
Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele and Dr Beverley Costa have been collaborating on research into this area for 13 years. They represent a cross-disciplinary research partnership between the fields of Applied Linguistics and Psychotherapy. They will present their findings on identity formation, emotional expression, language and trauma, linguistic agency and the importance of code-switching in therapy. It will be followed by examples of application and implementation in practice, across therapeutic modalities, of these research findings, including a model of good practice in interpreter-mediated therapy and examples of the products that have come out of their joint research.
Some references
Costa, B. (2020), Other Tongues - psychological therapies in a multilingual world, PCCS Books.
Dewaele, J.-M., Rolland, L., Cook, S. & Costa, B. (2023), Mixed methods when researching sensitive topics. In S. Bager Charleson & A. McBeath (Eds.), Supporting Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed methods Research, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 247-266.
Rolland, L., Costa, B., & Dewaele, J.-M. (2021), Negotiating the language(s) for psychotherapy talk: A mixed methods study from the Perspective of multilingual clients. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 21(1), 107-117.
Biography
Dr Beverley Costa grew up in a multilingual and cross-cultural family. After qualifying as a psychotherapist, she set up Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service (2000-2018) for multilingual clients. In 2009 she created a pool of mental health interpreters, in 2010 she established the national Bilingual Therapist and Mental Health Interpreter Forum and founded The Pásalo Project in 2017 www.pasaloproject.org to disseminate learning from Mothertongue. In 2013, Beverley established “Colleagues Across Borders” offering support to refugee psychosocial workers and interpreters based mainly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. She is a Senior Practitioner Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and has written several research papers and chapters.
Together with Jean-Marc Dewaele she won the 2013 British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Equality and Diversity Research Award. Beverley has produced a play about a couple in a cross-language relationship for the Soho Theatre, London.
In 2021 she received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation grant to create a free online training course on multilingualism and mental health: https://www.pasaloproject.org/multilingualism-mental-health-and-psychological-therapy---course-content.html. Her book Other Tongues - psychological therapies in a multilingual world was published in 2020. In 2023 she was appointed as a member of the Good Practice Steering Group for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She was also granted the title of Senior Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Arts and Communication Design, University of Reading.
Jean-Marc Dewaele is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism at Birkbeck, University of London. He has published 10 books and over 350 papers and chapters on individual differences in psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, psychological and emotional variables in Second Language Acquisition and Multilingualism. He is former president of the International Association of Multilingualism, the European Second Language Association and is current president of the International Association for the Psychology of Language Learning. He is General Editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. He and Beverley Costa won the Equality and Diversity Research Award from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (2013), the Robert Gardner Award for Excellence in Second Language and Bilingualism Research from the International Association of Language and Social Psychology (2016) and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the European Second Language Association (2022).
Contact name:
Birkbeck Counselling Centre, Department of Psychosocial Studies