As we go to press in a COVID-19 world, the topic of anxiety is foremost on our minds. While each situation has to be considered in its own context, how to manage different anxieties has common denominators. There is currently a sharp increase in forced migration around the globe so mental health professionals must develop effective skills, like the ability to adapt services to different contexts and cultures, to manage the needs of immigrant people. Problem-Solving Brief Therapy, as developed at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, is a systemic model of therapy, which aims at promoting change in the complaint the presenting client (the ‘talker’) cares about. The model’s roots in Constructivism foster integrating the clients’ beliefs and values into therapy to allow the therapists to adapt to the clients’ particular needs. This paper is the analysis of a single case where the therapist worked with an immigrant family because their child suffered from severe anxiety related to the parents’ threatened deportation. The paper focuses on premises and strategies that allowed minimising cultural barriers between therapists and family members, thus facilitating a strong therapeutic alliance conducive to improvement
Problem-Solving Brief Therapy (PSBT) has been used with migrants at the Brief Therapy Center/MRI since 1990. Nevertheless, literature concerning the use of PSBT on migrants is scarce. This paper will describe the use of PSBT with a migrant family seen at the Brief Therapy Center (BTC)/Mental Research Institute (MRI) because the son showed anxiety related to the parents’ threatened deportation. The article shows how the premises and trategies of PSBT facilitated a strong therapeutic alliance, minimising cultural barriers and promoting positive changes.
