What is the perception of treatment in some European mental health services? The point of view of users belonging to ethnic minorities

One of the most important criticism about mental health services regards the difficult that people meet when looking for a psychological support from these services. These health problems concern every citizen, but even more so for people with an ethnic background who are more exposed to discrimination, stigma and marginalization than the majority population of a country. For this reason, we decided to conduct research on scientific material on this topic, focusing on articles that shed light on the perspective of users belonging to ethnic minorities. The selected articles refer to some countries belonging to the European Union. Furthermore, the research focused on the main barriers that users reported perceiving when accessing mental health services. This paper offers a review of Europe literature concerning the need to estimate the main critical issues for which ethnic or migrant people are not receiving an appropriate help from mental health services. Another important characteristic is that the work aims to give a voice to the people involved in this review, which is why only articles and works that noted the user’s own perspective were considered. Our work found that people with different cultural background face specific barriers when seeking help from mental health services, in particular, we noted two main barriers that will be specifically explained. The results show that people with ethnic or migrant background have to face more and specific critical aspects when seeking psychological help compared to the main population of a nation. In particular, the criticism of being discriminated includes the criticism of being treated differently, unequally or disparately compared to the majority of population of a country. Even today, ethnicity plays a significant role in determining how people receive mental health care. The perception of receiving unfair and often ethnocentric treatment and the underrepresentation of ethnic minority patients in clinical services indicate that ethnic minorities face significant unmet healthcare needs, which may further contribute to the socioeconomic difficulties that some minority groups already face.