Inga-Britt Krause

Consultant Systemic Psychotherapist and Training and Development Consultant

Dr Inga-Britt Krause BSc Dip Fam Ther PhD studied Philosophy and later European Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen. This was followed by Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, UK where she received a BSc and later a PhD. Britt trained to be a Family Therapist in 1989 and became employed at the Marlborough Family Service in 1993 where she, together with colleagues, set up a Cross-Cultural Therapy Service. This began as a project and later became an independently funded Service which combined applied research with clinical service development.

Britt joined the Tavistock Clinic in 2001 in the post of Training & Development Consultant (Race & Equity). She is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, a member of the Association for Family Therapy and registered with UKCP both as a systemic psychotherapist and as a supervisor. She is on the Editorial Board of Anthropology & Medicine and has been the Assistant Editor of the International Journal of Social Psychiatry.

She was also a member of the Welcome Medal Committee for work in Medical Anthropology in 1996 and chaired this committee in 1998 and has served on the Race & Equity Committee and on the Training Committees of the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Britt hase taught and consulted widely both nationally and internationally particularly on the topic of cross-cultural psychotherapy and the relevance of social anthropology to psychotherapy research and practice.

Britt’s first research involved ethnographic fieldwork high-caste Hindus in North Western Nepal. The research was concerned with the relationship between economic differentiation, kinship and caste organisation and some of the material was presented in a Ph.D thesis entitled: Kinship, Caste and Economics in North-West Nepal. This work was conducted in Nepali. Following this she was Principal Researcher on a comparative project examining agrarian relations in North India.

This was followed in 1986 by an appointment as Research Fellow in the Academic Department of Psychiatry, University College and Middlesex School of Medicine. This research project was interdisciplinary and was carried out in collaboration with Professor R Rosser. It included anthropological fieldwork with Sikh and Hindu Punjabis in Bedford and a survey of Punjabi and English white patients visiting three Health Centres in Bedford. It was specifically concerned with Punjabi concepts of mental illness and with symbolic and hermeneutic aspects of somatisation and symptoms of distress.

A major focus was the communication between primary carers and Punjabi patients and issues of translation arising in the clinical setting. This research informed clinical work with Asian patients. Following this In 2004 she headed a research project entitled ‘Ethnicity as it Relates to the Psychological Well-Being of Asian Adolescents’. This was a collaboration with Professor Martyn Barrett and Dr Nimmi Hutnik then of Roehampton University.