The Requirement of a Situated Approach in the Treatment of Preschool Children with a Refugee Background: Discussion of a Case Study.

Sánchez Guerrero, HA; Janßen, M;

Research article (journal) | Peer reviewed

Abstract

In recent years, increasingly more German-born preschool children of refugee parents have been referred to the 'specialized consultation service for refugee minors' of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University Hospital Münster. This 'change' in the use of the above-mentioned consultation service could be understood as a 'natural' consequence of the family life cycle of forced migrants who some years ago came to Germany as adolescents or young adults and started here a family. The treatment of 'preschoolers with a refugee background', as we may call this group of patients, confronts mental health practitioners with particular challenges. In this contribution, we specify some of these challenges and argue that, due to the deep intertwinement of different aspects of these patients' condition, a 'situated approach' is required when treating this population.When planning therapeutic interventions for preschoolers with refugee background, their families should be conceived as unified systems which in their social and transcultural embeddedness exhibit trans-individual vulnerabilities and resources. By discussing a case study, we illustrate how an extremely challenging child psychiatric treatment could succeed only on the condition that we focused on the interconnectedness of various factors determining not merely the patient's symptomatic behavior but, furthermore, the behavior of the family, i. e., on the condition of focusing on the situated nature of the problematic.

Details about the publication

JournalPraxis der Kinderpsychologie und Kinderpsychiatrie (Prax Kinderpsychol Kinderpsychiatr)
Volume72
StatusPublished
Release year2023
DOI10.13109/prkk.2023.72.2.148
Link to the full texthttps://doi.org/10.13109/prkk.2023.72.2.148
KeywordsFamilienlebenszyklus; Kontextsensitivität; Vorschulpsychiatrie; context sensitivity; family life cycle; preschool psychiatry; situated approach; situierter Ansatz; transgenerational transmission of trauma; transgenerationale Weitergabe von Traumatisierung

Authors from the University of Münster

Janßen, Marius
Clinic of Paediatric and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Sanchez Guerrero, Hector Andres
Clinic of Paediatric and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy