Who should be integrated and why?

Rome, 26 June 2009
NIHMP Conference Hall

NIHMP, in collaboration with the Department of Neurological, Psychiatric and Rehabilitative Sciences for the age of development – Specialized Neuropsychology Service of Umberto I Hospital and La Sapienza University in Rome organized the workshop “Who should be integrated and why? Child neuropsychiatry and migration: an integration opportunity for everybody”

Why this workshop?
Migrant children represented and still represent “a new challenge” for many directors of health care and school services because their presence calls into question working methodology, diagnostic and therapeutic protocols created by and for Western people.
Migrant children oblige Italian health system to reinvent crystallized know-how and expertise and to imagine different health care models.
Nowadays Italy is an arrival point for stable migrants; in particular, our country is witnessing a so-called “integration phase” of the migration process. A significant indicator is the high number of migrant minors in the national territory due to the increase of birth and family reunification rates.
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Mental health services assist a growing number of migrant minors expressing their own and their parents’ need to be recognized. This situation requires knowledge, expertise, models and intervention methods fit to “receive, understand and treat” children and families from different countries.
The attention given to this reality led to plan a pilot project aimed at assessing the mental health status of the first and second generation of migrant minors living in Rome.
The project provides the collaboration between two structures: the Specialized Neuropsychology Service (SSNps) of the Child Neuropsychiatry Unit of the Department of Neurological, Psychiatric and Rehabilitative Sciences for the age of development of La Sapienza University in Rome and NIHMP.
The mental health Observatory is operative since 2004 and the workshop is important in order to present:
- The history of the Service (its creation, difficulties in organizing the team and in planning a working method);
- Changes related to users (number of children, age for the first visit, reason and location of the visit and structures referring patients to the specialist service);
- Epidemiological data of the Service;
- Preliminary study on the psychological and sociological functioning and on the school behaviour of migrant and Italian children;
- In brief to present/discuss/compare the intervention model (diagnosis and treatment) and the experience of the Child Neuropsychiatry Service for migrant minors and their families: an intervention model focusing on the child considered in his relations with family, environment, background and existence and not only based on the symptom/problem.
How to take care of migrant children and their families in mental health services?
Child neuropsychiatry is a medical science focused on minors and the various phases of their development, which is meant as a constant integration process between individual, relational and social factors. Therefore, development is a process including motorial, sensory, behavioural, cognitive, psychological and relational aspects.
The methodological bases of child neuropsychiatry are:
- Attention to developmental processes, analysis and interpretation of signs and symptoms in accordance with the development age of the minor;
- Integration of the different aspects of the individual development (genetic, social and psychological) and integration of different professionals working in team to work out diagnosis and treatment.
In practice, the approach and the intervention of the Child Neuropsychiatry Service is based on the care of minors and their families on different plans: family, health care, school, social environment.
In clinical practice, when a migrant family asks for counselling, it is impossible to ignore the influence of its cultural background on child’s symptom expression.
Culture is a central theme not only to understand the suffering of migrant parents and children, but also to plan effective treatment. Professionals involved in this field need a different perspective, a developmental, integrated, multicultural and multidisciplinary approach: this means collaboration between psychoanalysis and anthropology. This approach guarantees equal importance to the cultural dimension of the disorder and its treatment and to the analysis of the mental mechanisms behind it.