Speaker at the Cross-Cultural Mental Health Festival
Tin was invited to speak at the “Tverrkulturell Mental Helse Festival. His contribution was the “lived experience” segment, pointing out that in the mental health associations, there is a high ratio of caucasians, where immigrants makes up of only a fraction. The hereditary mental illnesses in our society makes up of 2-3% of our society, and they do not discriminate skin color. Tin spoke of his own roots and the less fortunate, how his Vietnamese community lacked the conceptual understanding of “mental illnesses”, both those afflicted by environment and/or hereditary factors. He also sat in a panel with healthcare workers, and other mental illness associations.
His accounts are based on the Vietnamese community he grew up in, and what flew under the radar as every mental deviation was attributed to the “casualties of the war”. There is an importance of afflicted families to speak out about this, as these illnesses has a devastating impact on families living without every understanding what has befallen them. He gave detailed accounts of how one specific case only had two trajectories and nothing in between - either they succed or they become “a broken child”. His key message was as follows:
“The hereditary mental illnesses in our society makes up of 2-3%, and they do not discriminate skin color.”
In the panel Tin attended, different topics emerged, such as the explanatory tools immigrants/different backgrounds has to explain their “hurt and woes” in order to get help. Tin discussed the level of competency here required of the health worker assigned to the specific case: proficiency in giving transversal linguistic, bureaucratic, legislative help. The health sector has limited resources, where the panel unanonomiously agreeing upon the necessity of cross-cultural training in the healthcare education.
The program consisted of:
08:40 – 09:00: Registration and coffee
09:00 – 09:10: Welcome to the Multicultural Health Festival, by Wolela Haile (Managing Director, THI)
09:10 – 09:20: Opening, by Mayor Anne Lindboe
09:20 – 09:50: Public Health Survey, Public Health and Care Department, Health Agency
09:50 – 10:15: Meeting places that create community – concrete solutions and the way forward, by Ole Marius Minde Johnsen, National Director, Mental Health
10:15 – 10:25: Break
10:25 – 10:55: Women’s mental health in a multicultural perspective, by Bernadette Nirmal Kumar, MD
10:55 – 11:20: Health meets culture: Role play in practice – Transcultural Health Information (THI)
11:20 – 11:40: Research report
11:40 – 12:25: Lunch
12:25 – 12:45: Hiv Norway
12:45 – 13:15: Mental health, substance use, and youth, by Leoul Mekonen, RKF Foundation
13:15 – 13:40: User experience - Tin Phan and lack of conceptual understanding in minority groups.
13:40 – 13:45: Break
13:45 – 14:05: Other associations
14:05 – 15:00: Panel discussion
