ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Swedish cultural context, drawing from ongoing migration research related to the meaning-making challenges as well as opportunities involved for mental health systems in the receiving host countries. There is an over-dominance in mental health approaches of forced migration populations that experienced trauma almost always leads to traumatic symptom development and the ubiquitous over-generalisation of a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) orientation. The paradigm used for understanding trauma and trauma's effects is also linked to the paradigm of cultural understanding. The frustration of the patient and the frustration of the psychiatrist reflect the widely present reality that mental health systems in Sweden. In the psychiatrist case, there is the awareness of the need to re-examine the paradigm of mental health used in order to test its adequacy for identifying both the needs and the resources of the very wide spectrum of mental health service users in contemporary Sweden.
