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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

people dont go to psychologists in the first place in the middle east. They should have a religious/community leader who could help them with this.

western psychologists have very little clue as to how to deal with things like these.

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Hmmm, no. I come from a small town in the Southeastern US. People are incredibly religious, you can't even sell alcohol there thanks to the laws they've passed. A part of the local culture is consulting preachers for counseling instead of psychologists/therapists. It causes enormous amounts of damage. We should never encourage people to visit witch doctors over trained medical professionals, culture be damned.

Can anyone who downvoted this explain why?

It seems like a reasonable suggestion to me that people visit trained professionals rather than quacks, or people who will give advice or 'help' skewed by their own personal, perhaps fundamentalist, beliefs.

If you've talked to enough of those trained professionals and if you've read the research their training is based on (and the research about that training), you'll realize that quite a lot - if not most - of the therapeutic effect comes from the patient having someone to talk with about their problems. Which is something a caring local community leader can do as well. 'mrrrgn knows some bad examples, I've personally seen some good - the heads of congregations in the religion I was raised in actually get something of a psychology training, though it's not called such - rather, it's just advice about talking and helping people in need. OTOH they'll happily refer you to seek outside, secular psychological and psychiatric help as well.

Curiously, psychology itself was quite mixed with religion in the past; in some places, it still is. I remember reading Polish psychology texts as a kid, quite a lot of them had serious Catholic undertones (and sometimes explicit references). Which is sort-of understandable when you can count on religion as being an important part of your average person's life.

Unfortunately 'local community leader' is usually synonymous with 'someone that has an agenda'.

But some religions have on going problems with abusive harmful "therapy" such as conversion therapy; and there have in the recent past been severe problems with religious organisations telling abuse victims not to go to police.

Their religious leaders are a part of the problem, you can't have it both ways like it or not for both the migrants and Europe to survive this process some one has to give, and considering that their "culture" has had quite a big influence on why we in this situation in the first place I think for the benefit of all parties that's the part that should give in.

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