IJSP Number 6, 2024

106 to provide supervision and support groups for Ukrainian psychotherapists. These were not run like traditional supervision groups however and came to meet a variety of needs of the Ukrainian psychotherapists who became group members. Since the term “psychotherapist” has different meanings in the different countries that participate in this project we will clarify that for our purposes it includes psychologists at the doctoral level, master’s level clinicians, and psychiatrists, all of whom are providing mental health services to the people of Ukraine. This paper will focus on the experiences of a group of volunteer interpreters who make communication possible between volunteer supervisors from several democratic countries and Ukrainian psychotherapists who provide services to Ukrainian citizens. The following section reviews some of the literature in the mental health and interpretation professional communities that establish the greater difficulty of interpreting in mental health settings. After that, the authors specifically focus on the further demands interpreters face in the context of war, with high rates of trauma that reverberate through the layers of clients, psychotherapists, interpreters, and supervisors. Furthermore, we touch on the fact that group dynamics come into play as they do in all groups. As with many of the groups that were formed to assist the psychotherapists (the ones that the interpreters provided interpretation for), this group served several functions and straddled the areas of peer supervision, consultation, support, and psychotherapy. Firsthand experiences of several interpreters who participated in this group are offered to help document the challenges encountered. Some of the interpreters were psychotherapists themselves, and some were professional interpreters with no psychotherapy training. 2. THE DEMANDS OF INTERPRETATION IN MENTAL HEALTH SETTINGS It is well documented that the act of interpreting in a mental health setting is more demanding than other settings for the interpreter. This seems to be the consensus in both the mental health community as well as the community of professional interpreters. Doherty [1] conducted research that found that these interpreters rated their job as more demanding and emotionally intense than in other contexts and raised the notion that the clinician’s role may not be well understood by the interpreter. Regarding how well collaborating clinicians and interpreters understand each other’s roles Hamerdinger and Karlin [2] highlighted several important factors for both interpreters and clinicians including interpreter fluency, familiarity and experience in mental health settings, the quality of the working relationship of the dyad, handling of issues of transference and countertransference in a triangular situation with the addition of the client, and