Repetition and Repertoires: The Creation of Cultural Differences in Dutch Mental Health Care

This paper explores how culture and cultural differences are created and used to maintain power of definition in mental health care. The author argues that although in mental health care an open approach in care for immigrants is stimulated, cultural differences are strategically used to maintain the status quo of mental health care and mental health professionals. The result is that such strategies keep immigrants in a marginal position. In mental health care, immigrants belong to a classificatory anomaly or, in processual terms, to liminal personae. The author concludes that interaction in mental health care is a manifestation and reproduction of larger class, racial, ethnic and gender conflicts in the broader society.