Beverley Costa

During my training as a psychodrama psychotherapist, I became aware of the lack of psychological therapy services for people who didn’t speak English as their first language. I come from a bicultural, trilingual family, and it seemed like quite an important gap. So, when I completed my training, I set up Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service (2000-2018) a culturally and linguistically sensitive psychotherapeutic service and in 2009. I established the Mental Health Interpreting Service. In 2017, I founded The Pásalo Project www.pasaloproject.org to disseminate learning from Mothertongue. I am a Senior Practitioner Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and, together with Professor Jean Marc Dewaele, we won the 2013 British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Equality and Diversity Research Award. My book Other Tongues - psychological therapies in a multilingual world draws on two decades of experience and it was published in 2020.