Consultation for Arabian-speaking patients: particularities and specificity in psychiatry

This type of consultation is practiced by Arabic or French psychiatrists, speaking Arabic, who have a knowledge of Arabic culture and who work in a transcultural and ethno-psychiatrists environment. These psychiatrists have developed a psychiatric school specialized in the Arabic environment and culture with its specificity and its particularisms (the Arabo-Islamic nucleus). It allows both the psychiatrist and the patient to communicate because of the use of the same language and the knowledge of the same culture, there is a language code between the patient and the psychotherapeutist. Is it really necessary for the psychiatrist to have the same culture as his patient? As a matter of fact, most of bur patients from the Middle East were born in France from parents either one of them Arabic or both Arabic, and they are more often than not muslims. They speak either only Arabic, or only French, or are bilingual. This is how the author came to consider necessary to develop our research on this type of consultation in France so as to define the specificity of its psycho-pathology and how to deal with it.