🇳🇱 The Hague

Netherlands

An international city where the Netherlands itself is barely visible

Dutch, English in international settings

Temperate and windy, beside the North Sea

Smaller than Amsterdam's, largely professional and academic

High

The Hague is a city of international courts, embassies and organisations. Many Iranians here arrived on multi-year contracts and work in entirely English-speaking environments. Life is orderly, and a sense of belonging to the host country frequently never arrives.

The Hague - An international city where the Netherlands itself is barely visible

Life inside the expat bubble

The Hague has a quality few European cities share: you can live here for years and effectively never enter Dutch society. Your colleagues come from fifteen countries, your child's school is international, your friends are as temporary as you are.

That bubble is comfortable and equally dangerous. Comfortable because nobody asks you to learn Dutch or to understand the local culture. Dangerous because when your contract ends you discover you planted no roots in all those years.

For Iranians who, after years of displacement, were looking for somewhere to stay, that organised rootlessness can hurt more than ordinary homesickness. It feels like being in transit again, only this time on a good salary.

The treatment route, and the language question

As everywhere in the Netherlands, specialist mental health care runs through a huisarts referral and the GGZ wait takes months. Because of the international population, English-speaking therapists are easier to find in The Hague than the national average, and a Farsi-speaking one still barely exists.

English, however fluent, is a second language. When you want to talk about your relationship with your father, or about the night you decided to leave, the simultaneous translation in your head creates distance. You report the events instead of living them again.

What Farsi-speaking newcomers in The Hague find hardest

The international bubble, and no real contact with Dutch society

Fixed-term contracts, and the instability of any long plan

GGZ waits, and no Farsi-speaking therapist available

Therapy in a second language, and the nuance that gets lost

Friendships that end when colleagues rotate out

Distance from family, and the permanent question of staying or going

Speaking in the language you felt it in

Even if your English is excellent, feeling is built in the mother tongue. A session in Farsi means talking about the problem itself from the first minute, rather than about its cultural background.

Sessions are online, so if your contract moves or you transfer to another country, your therapist stays with you.

Farsi-speaking therapists available to you

Every Emotral session is online, so these therapists — wherever in the world they live — are available to Iranians in The Hague, and you see the session time in your own local clock.