“The question of how countries with increasingly diverse populations deal with and embrace this diversity is a central challenge for our time. Those of us who are interested in mental health issues have tended to frame migration and refugee issues in terms of the mental health effects of these experiences on the migrants themselves. This is an appropriate focus, and there is ample evidence that migration is not uncommonly a stressful and potentially devastating experience at the best of times, even when the migrant has not suffered abuse, torture, and deprivation.

If we think more broadly, however, there are other important mental health questions which migration raises for society as a whole. How does a society, which has had one view of itself, accommodate to another identity (or set of identities)? How can this be done with benefit to the society at large? How can racism and xenophobia be curbed, and how can enabling opportunities for all citizens be created in a new context, a context which may appear strange and threatening both to migrants and to those who have been in the country longer, and see their own world changing?

For Australia, the change of context has been both dramatic and astonishingly quick. According to the Department of Immigration & Multicultural & Indigenous Affairs, the “White Australia Policy” was fully dismantled only thirty years ago – in 1973 – and the New Agenda for Multicultural Australia was tabled in Parliament only at the end of 1999. Australia, like my own country, South Africa, has a strong and recent history of race-based policies, and of seeing dominant white culture as the norm to which others should aspire.

Australian mental health workers interested in refugee and migration issues, then, face two intertwined challenges: that of how to assist migrants with their mental health needs, and how, at the same time, to contribute to a society which can promote mental health for all by taking on both the difficulties and opportunities posed by diversity. Nicholas Procter and his team have admirably addressed these challenges by designing a mental health intervention focusing on reciprocity – a process of mutual learning and growth.

Given the postmodern turn in the social sciences over recent decades, it is easy to pay lip-service to a concept like reciprocity or ‘reflexivity’. All too often, reflexivity is dealt with by researchers in a perfunctory way by their stating who they are, and where they come from, as though this admission in itself constitutes a genuine engagement with the challenges posed by the fact that each of us brings a set of assumptions – personal, social, political and cultural – to everything we do. Far too many people claim the moral high ground by speaking on behalf of those who are in various ways denied a voice of their own.

What Procter and his colleagues have achieved is something far more rare, and far more challenging – a genuine engagement, changing hearts and minds of all involved. With elegant simplicity, for example, Procter shows how the stories clinicians make of migrants’ experiences are different from those the migrants make for themselves, and how the dialogue between these stories creates a possibility for re-authoring, not only of migrants’ worlds and lives, but also of those of mental health services. Procter records not only processes of interaction but also processes of real learning.

I warmly recommend that this book be read – with both head and heart – by all who wish to contribute to a world enriched rather than threatened by all the different ways in which we are human.”

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