Intercultural Counselling in Denmark

Denmark, a Scandinavian country, along with Sweden and Norway in the North Europe, has been and to an extent, is still characterised by egalitarian principles, national welfare policy (the Scandinavian Welfare Model) and a dominant discourse of homogeneity, which influences the phenomenon of intercultural counselling – the main focus of this chapter. However, in the past decades these characteristics have been changing (Overland, Guribye & Lie, 2014). Understanding the practices of intercultural counselling in Denmark entails contextualising historically, how migration and mental health service provision for the ethnic minority populations has developed and is currently practiced. The first section of this chapter provides this backdrop, followed by a presentation of the major clinical approaches to working with minorities living in Demark. The next section looks more closely at some strategic practices and some ‘traditional’ mental health care practices in ethnic minority communities, followed by a couple of case studies. The chapter ends with discussions on future perspectives (a SWOT analysis) regarding the mental health of ethnic minorities in Denmark and the care they receive.