Creating standards for using interpreters in mental health situations

Background

The ‘Introduction to Mental Health Interpreting’ was offered at no cost to NZSL interpreters and Deaf people who have experience with ‘Deaf interpreting’.  The learning programme included a mixture of online teaching and learning, four ‘live’ class sessions, and independent learning activities via access to an online learning system. The course covered three topics:

1. Understanding diagnostic discourse and broad communication aims of clinicians.
2. Common clinical challenges in working with deaf sign language users.
3. Practical ways interpreters can work collaboratively with mental health providers.

Expertise

Robyn Dean, PhD and Robert Pollard jointly facilitate this learning programme:

Robyn has been a nationally certified signed language interpreter for over thirty years with particular service in the field of healthcare. She conducts workshops internationally on the topics of ethics, reflective practice, work effectiveness, with particular emphases on healthcare interpreting and professional development. Robyn’s demand control schema, and her scholarship in decision-making and ethics in community interpreting is recognized internationally. 

Robert Pollard, Ph.D. is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, where he founded the Deaf Wellness Center, a mental health service, research, and training program, in 1990. He also served as Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf from 2016 to 2022. Dr. Pollard has particular expertise regarding deaf persons and mental health, sign language interpreting, and deaf population public health issues. He has served as an expert witness in more than 100 criminal and civil cases involving deaf persons. He has delivered over 400 addresses throughout the U.S. and abroad. 

Who attended?

74 NZSL interpreters registered to access the learning programme, 7 were students at AUT and 6 were Deaf people that work in mental health with Deaf people or do some Deaf interpreting. An average of 40 people attended each of the 4 ‘live’ online sessions that were held on a Saturday morning for 1.5hrs over an 8-week period. Over 90% of people accessed some or all of the additional learning materials (readings, watching pre-recorded videos and videos of hearing people with a variety of mental health presentations).

Feedback on the course

Overall participants were very complementary of the learning programme and many gave specific feedback (included in the end of programme evaluation) about how they would do things differently in future such as requesting pre and post-briefing sessions with clinicians; being less likely to ‘polish up the language of a Deaf person’; taking more of a role in sharing information with clinicians around language dysfluency and fund of information and having the confidence to advocate for the Deaf person if needed.