Discussion
Conclusion
Bibliography
Multiple Ways of Looking:
Learning from the Experience of Montréal’s Transcultural Seminars to Foster Cultural Safety in Youth Mental Health Services
The first time I attended a Transcultural Case Discussion Seminar was in the fall of 2013. It was Cécile Rousseau, the facilitator of this Seminar, who had invited me to join the group, even though I was not a member of one of the clinical teams that could take part in these meetings. If my memory serves me well, it was after I told her about my love of fieldwork that she invited me to coordinate an evaluative study on these Seminars, a project that involved attending the meetings for at least two years. I remember thinking to myself that this was a dream job, as I was going to be spending work time listening to stories. I recall sharing my enthusiasm with Cécile. “It will be a pleasure to work together,” she replied. I don’t know if she had any idea it would last that long.
I remember the feel of the moment as if it happened yesterday. I still see the light coming into the room. It was not a morning light, but rather a light that had been there a while, that already had events in its wake. A light that wasn’t as fresh as the one you have at the beginning of the day. The atmosphere in the room did not carry a morning energy either. At the back of the room, some people were making themselves a cup of coffee and it was not a morning coffee. It was an afternoon coffee. A coffee that helps you digest the first part of the day and find a second wind to get to the end of it. As I write about it now, I don’t have a clear memory of the person or team that presented a case to the group at that meeting. Nor do I have any recollection of the story that we were told and the ideas for interventions that we worked on as a group. What I do remember however is the setting in which the meeting took place. The beige of the room and the uncomfortable chairs that reminded me of schoolchildren’s chairs. I also remember the retractable wall, beige also, and dirty, that was used for the occasion to divide this large room in two, so that another group could have a meeting in the adjacent space. The type of accordion wall that you can stretch to create a partition and then push back in its wall pocket to restore the room to its original size. There were no pictures on the walls either, no decoration, and no color, except for the red of the emergency exit sign. In short, I remember the uninviting feel of the room, with only small windows at the top of the back wall that allowed a bit of the outside light to come in. In contrast to this lack of life in the place, to this boring environment, the energy present in the group was palpable. People seemed happy to see each other. Some were arriving from outside and had red noses and frozen speech. Others were clearly working in the same building, as evidenced by the absence of coats hanging from their forearms. A pleasure to take part in this meeting was obvious. I had already heard about Transcultural Seminars. I had already understood that they were dear to practitioners, but I had never had the opportunity to experience them from the inside.
I tend to be uncomfortable when I join a new group and this time was no exception. When I glanced at a few people who had already taken a seat at the tables set up in a rectangle for the occasion, I realized that I was possibly not the only one who was not a regular. I could see their attempt to give themselves some composure while waiting for the meeting to begin. This woman reading a document. That man writing a note and trying to look busy. Were they really uncomfortable, or was I lending them my feelings? Maybe they were just not that interested in being there? I also vividly remember the moment when someone closed the door and when people’s attitude went from intimate nonchalance to professional seriousness. The door closing and the cacophony of conversation slowly fading away seemed to echo the classical mise-en-scène of anthropological fieldwork. The dinghy departing from the shore and leaving Malinowski on the beach. This felt to me like such a moment. I remember my heart racing when I heard Cécile propose to go around the table to find out who was going to take part in the discussion that day. I remember how I felt like an impostor, seeing myself among people who have a front-row seat to people’s suffering and who accept to get their “hands dirty” (Rousseau, Nadeau, & Measham, 2008) in spite of the inevitable complicity with structural violence involved in professional clinical work, all the more so when working with minority families. I remember feeling that my hands were just as dirty as a researcher, but that their dirtiness was not as visible. And what I remember just as much is the feeling of relief brought by Cécile’s gaze, a gaze that clearly signified the legitimacy of my presence in the room. I remember feeling that the bet she was making by entrusting me with what I now consider to be important ethnographic fieldwork – in this day and age of a populist denial of systemic racism and of “cancel culture” that reminds us of the ghosts of other times – this trust in me revealed by her smile that could be seen by the whole group, was in fact opening me a door to this world. In retrospect, the most important thing that I retain from that first meeting is the feeling that I was invited to join a group of professionals who shared a concern for understanding the complexity of human experience. To this day, I consider that this warm introduction allowed me to start developing a bond of trust with the practitioners taking part in Transcultural Seminars. And it is in fact this bond of trust that has endured over time that has allowed me to carry out the doctoral project that I am going to talk about in this thesis.