ABSTRACT
The majority of refugees referred to the Adult Department will be offered treatment in out-patient psychotherapy groups. Therapy groups, in which seven or eight patients meet together for one and a half hours on a weekly basis with a single therapist, are sometimes regarded as cut-price, economy class treatment, less valuable and less effective than first-class travel with an individual therapist. This chapter provides a notion of emotional capital to encompass the body of internal resources an individual requires in order to function in a social world. It describes three typical patients in the Refugees’ Group as representing different aspects of the emotional problems inherent in dislocation and resettlement in a strange country. The chapter offers the individuals a three-stage treatment: the one-to-one consultations already described; a shorter-term specialist group for asylum seekers whose English was limited; and eventually dispersal to the heterogeneous groups discussed.
