#3 Baffour Ababio - Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre

Bereavement Room

Today's guest in the Bereavement Room is Baffour Ababio, a psychoanalytic intercultural psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in private practice and at Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre.

Baffour completed his training at University College London and the Guild of Psychotherapists and is a member of UKCP and BAPPS (British Association for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Supervision). Alongside his clinical role Baffour developed a career in managing mental health services integrating a community based response to support recovery from a broad range of mental health problems. He has written articles and co-edited a volume on psychotherapy: ‘Ababio, B. and Littlewood, R. (eds) (2019) Intercultural Therapy: Challenges, Insights and Developments. London: Routledge’.

In this episode Baffour reflects on his journey that lead him to therapy, his conflict with his majority and minority Ghanaian background, colonialism, Grenfell fire and frustration around representation in Psychotherapy.

There is poor racial representation across Psychotherapy and Counselling and I conclude this is related to financial inequality and discrimination, in order to be representative we need to find out how many ethnic minority students progress on to continue training after their foundation year and how many drop out and why.

During our chat I couldn't help but think about shocking levels of economic and racial inequality that was revealed in The Colour of Money, a Runnymede report released in April 2020. For example, Black African and Bangladeshi households have 10 times less wealth than White British people.

Recommendations from the report include strengthening discrimination law, as well as the need for targeted policies to tackle longstanding inequalities, and for ensuring racial inequalities are considered in thinking about how to design a fairer, more resilient economy.

With this in mind we need to be mindful that this isn't about students giving up halfway through but individual circumstances that need to be taken into account why student's do not progress on with training for example financial hardships and experiences of racism during training that can force students to drop out.

Training to be a Psychotherapist or Counsellor at a top school is the equivalent of a deposit on a property in London. (13k-25k) sometimes exc other costs such as being in approved therapy throughout the duration of the training.

As always thank you for listening.

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