BCHS Annual Report 2025 - Report - Page 35
Counselling & Mental Health
Torture and trauma
counselling honours
each person
Our torture and trauma services
strive to provide best practice
care with culturally responsive
mental health support. Utilising
the Foundation House Integrated
Trauma Recovery model, the
team consists of counsellors and
community capacity building
workers.
Bendigo has a large population of
people of refugee background, and
our service employs community
workers from relevant backgrounds
who bring both professional
expertise and profound cultural
understanding to their work, which
includes running Karen and Hazara
advisory groups to support the
team to work with community to
enhance mental health literacy.
This approach goes far
beyond translation or cultural
interpretation. When people of
refugee and asylum-seeking
backgrounds 昀椀rst connect with the
team, it is with a bilingual intake
worker who provides a linguistically
and culturally appropriate
explanation of counselling and
mental health, then commences
a trauma informed intake and
facilitates a warm handover to the
counsellor once allocated.
These community capacity
building workers and counsellors
work together to provide a holistic,
warm environment for people to
start their healing journey. They
create bridges between worlds,
helping clients navigate trauma
recovery while building new lives
in Bendigo. They understand the
nuances of cultural grief, the
complexity of maintaining identity
while adapting to new systems,
and the unique strengths that
people bring to their own recovery
journey.
The team also run a variety
of groups, from psycho-social
groups to psycho education,
to psychotherapeutic. Often in
partnership with a counsellor and
a community capacity building
worker, this assists individuals
to engage with the team on
the level they feel comfortable
and ready for, and provides a
way to develop connection and
engagement with the di昀昀erent
levels of therapeutic intervention.
This model demonstrates that truly
e昀昀ective trauma care must honour
the whole person, including their
cultural identity, lived experience,
and community connections.
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In October 2024 the advisory groups joined forces
to walk for mental health. Together they covered a
combined 170kms along the O'Keefe trail, accompanied
by friends and family, to raise funds for mental health
support via the Black Dog Institute’s One Foot Forward
campaign.
Connecting with older
people
BCHS began delivering psychological
therapy services to residents in two aged
care facilities from August 2024. The
services include one-on-one counselling
sessions and a weekly social group, The
Men’s Group (with The Women’s Group
to follow in September 2025). Within this
space, the practicing clinician is often
tasked to review clients’ current mental
state and provide secondary consultation to
sta昀昀, GPs and family. This service continues
to soar in the aged care mental health
space.
