We need to be able to accommodate these people confidently in the community with them not having to leave their identity or their culture or their language behind. Integrated approaches valued diversity, preserving difference, and concentrated on increasing accessibility and integration with the wider community. The ‘wrong’ way was to ask the patient probing questions that may cause offence and/or to take offence if the patient did not adhere to Australian customs in everyday social interactions (e.g. a male patient refusing to shake hands with a female provider). The ‘right’ way was to first acquire facts about cultural customs or beliefs, and then to respect and work with these beliefs. I think being a psychiatrist your first thing is to detect psychopathology and I think, you know, depression, psychosis, mania, sure there’s cultural variation but there is a commonality, it’s quite universal. One participant, a psychologist, viewed the term as simply a “skill set” and preferred the term “cultural intelligence” describing that as the need to be aware of each person having a unique culture.
- The goal of this free e-learning program is to help behavioral health professionals increase their cultural and linguistic competency.
- They understand that one-size-fits-all approaches may not be effective across all cultural contexts.
- A majority of the participants were currently pursuing or had obtained graduate degrees in clinical or counseling psychology, with the remaining with specializations in school psychology, applied psychology, or other areas (see Table 1).
- These studies implemented models of cultural competence that were evaluated by qualitative or participatory methods, or presented an evaluation of an intervention to improve cultural competency.
The Importance of Cultural Competence in Mental Healthcare
The final codebook included nine domains related to the adaptation process (framework, persons), specific adaptations applied to the intervention (materials, terms, values, timing, content, setting), or intervention outcomes (outcome), each described as follows. After screening the 399 new articles, 16 full texts were reviewed for eligibility, of which 10 were included in the final sample. In an interventionist role, CHWs often use their experiences to connect with clients and to provide care https://www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/schizophrenia/patient-education that is reflective of their clients’ cultural backgrounds . The ongoing mental health crisis presents a significant public health concern across communities in the United States . Building upon a previous review, we searched PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, CINAHL, and PsycINFO and examined 32 interventions in 37 articles.
However, research with Indian-Australian patients with depression suggest that neither culture, gender nor age affect the therapeutic relationship. Our data do reveal that practitioner’s communication style and ways of building cultural concordance was influenced by their own ethnicity and where they worked along the health-seeking continuum. We are unable to comment on whether such perceptions manifested from clinical experience, or reflected implicit biases, or what impact this had on clinical practice and patient outcomes. Instead, as some of our data show, they actively sought to maintain a power differential, perceiving in some instances that this was an expectation from their patients and might be beneficial to their therapeutic alliance. Practitioners who were more functionally-oriented, also tended to be more authoritative in their communication with patients justifying this approach on account of mental illness stigma, language barriers, and different explanatory models of illness; patient factors that resonate with previous research 54,55,56,57,58.
DataAnnotation
There is significant literature exploring the importance and need of organisational support and commitment to operationalise cultural competence 70, 71. Some practitioners felt that cultural competence was ignored or trivialised on a wider scale and that some of their colleagues harboured prejudiced and discriminatory attitudes. While none of the participants in this study used family members as interpreters, this problem has been widely noted as an impediment to effective consultation 65,66,67.
How do mental health practitioners operationalise cultural competency in everyday practice? Taking these different factors into consideration there needs to be a greater focus on developing multi-faceted interventions to inculcate cultural competence across the medical professions. It provides insight into the perspectives of those working on the frontline, especially the near-silent voices of rural practitioners, thus giving a deeper and richer understanding of the challenges faced by mental health practitioners and future directions for research and training. Finally, this study reported findings of self-perceived cultural competence, which might not be reflective of practices of cultural competence overall.
For example, using bilingual texts or celebrating cultural holidays in class can help students feel acknowledged and valued. Teachers should incorporate students’ home languages and cultural references into lesson plans, not only to validate their identities but also to enhance engagement. It’s important to recognize that ENL (English as a New Language) students often navigate both linguistic and cultural displacement simultaneously.