Author Question: Describe three ways that a therapist can strive to provide culturally competent mental health ... (Read 241 times)

darbym82 · **on:** Jun 22, 2018

Describe three ways that a therapist can strive to provide culturally competent mental health services.

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

What are cultural syndromes? Why are they important for clinicians to be aware of in relation to understanding symptoms in children? Provide one example of a cultural syndrome and the symptoms that the clinician may see exhibited by the child.

What will be an ideal response?

raili21 · **Reply #1 on:** Jun 22, 2018

Answer to Question 1

Culturally competent children's mental health services may be provided in a number of ways. For example, in therapy for Hispanic children and adolescents, cultural competence may be achieved by matching children and families with clinicians of the same ethnicity; by customizing the treatment to Hispanic culturalvalues, beliefs, and customs (e.g., familism, spiritualism, and respeto); or by incorporating ethnic and cultural narratives and role play into therapy.

Answer to Question 2

Cultural syndromes refer to a pattern of co-occurring, relatively invariant symptoms associated with a particular cultural group, community, or context (APA, 2013). For example, mal de ojo or the evil eye is a concept that is widespread throughout Mediterranean cultures and Latino communities throughout the world. A malady to which children are especially vulnerable and believed to be caused by a hateful look or glance from a malicious person, the evil eye can cause fitful sleep, crying without apparent cause, diarrhea, vomiting, and fever in children. Cultural syndromes rarely fit neatly into one Western diagnostic category (Alarcn, 2009). In addition, although the cross-cultural validity of Western diagnostic criteria varies widely depending on the disorder, data regarding their validity across cultures for many childhood disorders is lacking (Canino & Alegria, 2008). Therefore, it is important that clinicians assess the extent to which a child's cultural background and context affect the expression of both individual symptoms and clinical disorders.