🇸🇪 Gothenburg

Gothenburg has two faces. One is the city centre with its cafes, canals and university. The other is the outer districts built in the housing programme of the 1960s and 70s, where most residents today are immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Many Iranians who arrived in the waves of the 1980s and 90s settled in exactly those districts and stayed. Life there is safe and cheaper and has a Farsi-speaking social network, and its distance from official Sweden is real: in schooling, in the job market, and in how you are described in the media.

The children of those families often have an experience their parents did not: Swedish is their first language, and their address still passes judgement on them. That contradiction is one of the quieter sources of anger and fatigue in Gothenburg's second generation.

Integration in Sweden is a permanent political and media argument, and the immigrant is usually its subject rather than a participant in it. You hear your neighbourhood described on television, you read statistics about your group, and nobody has asked you.

The experience has a name: a loss of agency. The sense that the story of your life is being written by other people. For somebody who came from a country where their voice was also not heard, that repetition can reopen an older wound.

One of the things therapy can actually do is take the narrative back. Talking about your own experience, in your own language, without having to justify or simplify it for anybody.

The official route to mental health care in Sweden runs through the vårdcentral, the local health centre. You make contact or submit a request through 1177, then an assessment, then a referral if one is needed. What is usually offered first is cognitive behavioural therapy, frequently in an internet-based self-guided form.

The care guarantee promises timelines, and in practice the psychology queue in many regions runs considerably longer. The good part of the Swedish system is the annual cost ceiling: the main barrier here is not money, it is waiting.

And if you want to take that route in Farsi, there is usually no option. An interpreter is sometimes available, and therapy through an interpreter is a different thing: there is a third person in the room, and part of what you meant stays in that gap.