Some families who use the Marlborough Family Service prefer to see therapists who are culturally similar to themselves and who speak their mother tongue. The Cultural Therapy Centre provides such a service.
The team consists of eight part time bilingual therapists from the Bangladeshi, Chinese, Arab and Pakistani communities. They speak a range of languages, including Sylethi, Bangla, Urdu / Hindi, Punjabi, Cantonese, Mandarin and Arabic and are themselves first or second-generation migrants. Staff have completed (or are in the process of ) various professional trainings including Individual Counselling, Systemic Family Therapy, Islamic Counselling and others.
The Cultural Therapy Centre aims to provide a culturally and religiously sensitive service to clients in their preferred language, as well as consultation to other mental health professionals in the Trust. There is a high demand for the outpatient service, which results from time to time in a waiting list being put into operation.
Much of the work of the service involves outreach and is community based. For example, Manu Rehman regularly conducts home visits with Bangladeshi clients, who would otherwise find it difficult to reach or engage with services, and Cecilia Ko provides an invaluable weekly outreach clinic for the Chinese community in Soho. Houssam Ebrahim provides both a clinic-based and an outreach service for Arabic speaking clients. In addition to outpatient services for individuals and families the team has also made important cultural contributions to parenting and family assessments, especially in cases where English is not the first language and families are not familiar with professional systems.
The service is Co-ordinated by Dr Rabia Malik (PhD) in her role as Minority Ethnic Services Development Officer