A Narrative Inquiry into International Students' Lived Journeys of Counselling in Canada

Abstract

Most Canadian universities have recruitment policies and strategies for internationalizing their student population. International students represented more than 17% of the total student population in the 2020/2021 academic year. Despite their representation, not much is known about their experience with counselling/psychotherapy in the Canadian context. Previous research tends to problematize the population and rarely considers international students' voice. This qualitative study forefronts the lived experience of three international students' counselling journey while pursuing studies within higher education systems in Canada. The questions guiding the research were: What are the narratives of international students who have experienced a counselling journey in Canada? What are sojourners' constructed narratives of counselling in Canada? How do these narratives inform and/or resist larger societal discourses about international students and their mental health seeking? What can we learn from these narratives when creating support systems for international students? The method of narrative inquiry, as inspired by Polkinghorne (1995), was used to gather the sojourners' experiences in an interview of approximately 60 minutes. The transcribed interviews were transformed into a unique final storied narrative for each sojourner relating to their pre-, during-, and post-counselling experience in Canada. The researcher - who himself was an international student in Canada - hopes that this study unveils more hopeful narratives than the current "problem-laden" narrative with regards to providing counselling services to sojourners. The final narratives, and recommendations generated from them, may aid a variety of stakeholders within Canadian higher education institutions to better understand and respond to the unique mental health seeking journeys of international students.