Canada: Counselling Couples, South Asian Style

Canada: Counselling Couples, South Asian Style

For South Asian couples who live abroad ... accessing professional counselling to tide over a rough patch in a marriage is often out of the question. Most couples would rather live through a bad marriage than seek professional intervention or a divorce.

Responding to [the] rather general conclusion - that the western model [of counselling] will not work for cultures where family is built into every aspect of an individual's life - is a project currently underway at York University. The project caters to the need of the South Asian community for an ethno-specific couple counselling.

The South Asian Couple Counseling Project is ... the initiative of Saunia Ahmad, a PhD student at the university's clinical psychology programme. Daughter of Indian immigrants, Ahmad opted to do research with South Asians because "there is not a lot out there in terms of counselling with people of my community and there is also not much research of what is most effective." What is known, she says, is that most are not using the services; and that there are culturally-specific value differences in how they experience marriages, making it difficult for professionals trained in western models to help them.

Dr Yvonne Bohr, an Assistant professor at York University, has worked extensively with the Chinese community, particularly, young parents. She says, "The available research shows that needs may be different when you come from a collectivist community - versus an individualist community as we are here - that influences your family system, parenting system, and so on. But most of the models we use are largely based on western research and they may not always be appropriate as over 90 per cent of infants today are born in non-western countries."

York University professor and Ahmad's supervisor, specialist Dr David Reid, who is a partner on this project explains, "Models developed in North America largely in the 1950s and 1960s do not have anything to say about traditional marriages, particularly those from other cultures. Times have changed and there are a lot of South Asians in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), but we do not have models developed, tested or investigated with that particular group in mind."

Dr Reid says, "There is no doubt in my mind that what we may learn from working with South Asians may well benefit other cultures. We overemphasise personality, which is a very individualistic perspective, and we need to look at other factors, like culture. The idea is not to compartmentalise between ethnic and mainstream but to come up with an approach that is indigenous and built from people we work with."

Read the full article at this link: Counselling Couples, South Asian Style

Read Toronto Star's report (published July 10, 2008) on Sauni's work: A fighting chance for married couples

Here is a video report on Saunia's work




You can access the South Asian Couples Counselling website at http://www.southasianfamilies.com/ or contact Saunia Ahmad at 416-736-2100 x33224 or saunia [at] southasianfamilies.com