ABSTRACT
In mental health care, there is a lively debate about whether this type of help should be adapted for patients who have their roots in ‘cultures’ outside the borders of the countries they now live in. For several reasons, I will not enter this debate here. First of all, because it is my strong conviction that people will come to understand one another as soon as they are interested in each other and each other’s backgrounds. Culture, as a consistent pattern of norms and values, does not determine or cause behaviour. It is at best a pattern that one can detect in someone’s behaviour (Verheggen, 2005). Second, related to our topic here, I think that a lot of misunderstanding between people with different national and linguistic backgrounds arises because they literally do not understand one another. Needless to say, you have to have an interest in getting to know each other in order to be willing to bridge the language gap by, for example, engaging an interpreter. The first step towards a (mental) health care that is accessible for all is to establish a well-equipped interpreter service included in insurance-covered care.
