Wuste Tzega – Center for Culturally Adapted Psychotherapy is a center for providing diagnosis, therapy, guidance and counsel for people from diverse cultural backgrounds, integrating traditional and western psychotherapy interventions. Since its inception, Wuste Tzega’s primary focus has been Israel’s Ethiopian community, where the need is most acute due to the trauma of rapid integration into a fundamentally western culture.
The Need
The experience of the Ethiopian community in Israel is highly unique, unfortunately, not always in a positive sense. Mental health is a highly culturally sensitive field, which is why psychotherapy must be culturally adapted in order to be effective. Ethiopian Israelis face the difficulties of an immigrant group moving to a vastly different social and cultural context. In addition to these, Ethiopian Jews must also contend with the stigma related to the color of their skin. Existing governmental institutions are not equipped to deal with the social, cultural and psychological traumas of the Ethiopian Israeli immigrants. In her work at the Wuste Tzega clinic, Yeshitu has found this to be a definitive factor impacting the mental health issues unique to young Israeli Ethiopians, including those who were born here. Ethiopians immigrants in Israel are unfortunately committed to mental health institutions and detention centers in percentages far beyond their relative percentage in the local population. In these times of crisis, 88% of the Ethiopian community prefer traditional healers over conventional medical institutions, due to the latter’s inability to understand cultural context. At the same time, young Ethiopians are part and parcel of modern Israeli society and have need of the tools available to western psychiatry and psychotherapy. Thus there is a need for a mental health practice that understands and integrates traditional norms and interventions with those of modern western society.
Wuste Tzega – Center for Culturally Adapted Psychotherapy
Wuste Tzega was founded in January 2017 by Yeshitu Shmuel, who immigrated to Israel in 1983 from Ethiopia when she was 11 after having walked on foot through the Sudanese desert. Yeshitu received her MA from Tel Aviv University in clinical social work, specializing in trauma and stress. She has worked in psychiatric hospitals and clinics throughout Israel and is in high demand as a lecturer on traditional Ethiopian approaches to mental health and culturally adapted psychotherapy. After years of working within the Israeli public health system and frustrated by its lack of understanding and ability to meet the needs of Ethiopian clients, she decided to create a framework that would merge the best of both worlds, unbridled by bureaucracy or dogma that undermines the ability of practitioners to understand the inner world of those they are trying to help.