Cultural standards, power and subversion in cross-cultural psychotherapy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Culture and psychotherapy in a creolizing world
Transcultural psychiatry, 2006
call creolization the meeting, interference, shock, harmonies and disharmonies between the cultures of the world. .. [it] has the following characteristics: the lightening speed of interaction among its elements; the awareness of awareness: thus provoked in us; the reevaluation of the various elements brought into contact (for creolization has no presupposed scale of values); unforeseeable results. Creolization is not a simple cross breeding that would produce easily anticipated results.' (Edouard Glissant, 1997) The practice of psychotherapy depends on a fund of tacit knowledge shared by patient and clinician (Frank, 1973). Intercultural work challenges this shared 'assumptive world' and poses problems of translation and positioning, working across and between systems of meaning and structures of power that underpin the therapeutic alliance and the process of change. The encounter of patient and clinician from two different cultures is not simply a matter of confrontation or exchange between static systems of beliefs and values. Once viewed as self-contained worlds of meaning, cultures are now seen as systems of knowledge and practicesustained by cognitive models, interpersonal interactions, and social institutions-that provide individuals with conceptual tools for selfunderstanding and rhetorical possibilities for self-presentation and social positioning. Moreover, cultural worlds are open-systems, shaped by forces of migration, globalization, and hybridization (Hannerz, 1996; Papastergiadis, 2000). This flux destabilizes old values, identities and ways of life
Harvard child clinical psychologist Dr. Martín La Roche (2013) offers us a bold and courageous vision for moving the therapeutic relationship beyond the focus of the individual and as Toronto's Jordan Peterson puts it, their own responsibility for change. Martín's model of Cultural Psychotherapy does this through empowerment and consciousness-raising to understand the social determinants of health and their cultural contexts. As a community-based child psychiatrist (Di Nicola, 2012), I find this welcome because the core of my field-defined by Dante Cicchetti (1984) as "developmental psychopathology"-needs to be radically redefined for our times. Each term requires a re-imagining-what do we mean by development and what do we mean by psychopathology? Are they to be imagined individually or systemically? In this reply to Dr. Martin La Roche, I offer five situations to demonstrate the nuances and complexity of promoting community and social activism on the part of our patients in care as health professionals.
The future of cultural psychiatry: an international perspective
Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 2000
Résumé/Abstract La psychiatrie culturelle a évolué selon trois grandes lignes: 1) les études comparatives transculturelles des troubles psychiatriques et des guérisons traditionnelles; 2) les tentatives de répondre aux besoins de santé mentale de populations diversifiées sur le plan culturel qui comprennent des personnes autochtones, des immigrants et des réfugiés; 3) l'étude ethnographique de la psychiatrie même comme produit d'une histoire culturelle en particulier. Ces études prouvent à l'évidence que la culture est fondamentale ...
Trans-Cultural psychotherapy - world journal Psychotherapy
Modern psychological and psychotherapeutic methods arose in Europe and America in the late 19th-early 20 centuries on the basis of «Western philosophy» that rooted in Renaissance. Historical, social and cultural development of Europe has enabled principles of individualism, democracy, socialism and equality. As a consequence, such concepts as self, self-realization, selfidentification, self-mastery and so on emerged and evolved in psychology.
The history and future of cross-cultural psychiatric services
Community Mental Health Journal, 1996
With cultural issues prominent in the United States today and with ongoing rapid changes in health care management and delivery, this paper discusses the shift from a generic-type psychiatry (i.e., assuming that humans the world over are no different, and will react to given stressors in life in the same manner) to one recognizing that cultural beliefs, mores, peer pressure, family expectations, and other ingredients operate in unique combinations in various cultures and ethnic groups. These social and cultural factors can and will impact treatment modalities and outcomes. Literature reviewed herein illustrates the progressive stages of awareness and incorporation of cultural differences and the many ways they impact treatment. Unfortunately, the rise in managed, rationed health care threatens the future of this progression: It is essential that culturally-based managed care programs be developed and funded to ensure the availability of cost-effective treatment, through an integrated system of services, to patients of all cultural and economic backgrounds. Appropriately incorporating patients' cultural background has rapidly become one of the most challenging tasks for psychiatry in the United States. Though the definition of "cultural psychiatry" is difficult to agree upon (Moffic, Kendrick, Lomax, and Reid, 1987), it might more accurately refer to the consideration of the individual's cultural background, as well as that of the clinician; just as there is no generic patient, there is no generic psychiatrist. This introduces two highly variable factors into psychiatric encounters.
The role of culture and cultural techniques in psychotherapy: A critique and reformulation
American Psychologist, 1987
This article examines the role of cultural knowledge and culture-specific techniques in the psychotherapeutic treatment of ethnic minority-group clients. Recommendations that admonish therapists to be culturally sensitive and to know the culture of the client have not been very helpful Such recommendations often fail to specify treatment procedures and to consider within-group heterogeneity among ethnic clients. Similarly, specific techniques based on the presumed cultural values of a client are often applied regardless of their appropriateness to a particular ethnic client. It is suggested that cultural knowledge and culture-consistent strategies be linked to two basic processes--credibility and giving. Analysis of these processes can provide a meaningful method of viewing the role of culture in psychotherapy and also provides suggestions for improving psychotherapy practices, training, and research for ethnic-minority populations.
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
The author suggests to consider some important hidden connections in Global Mental Health (GMH) discourse and interventions, above all the political meaning of suffering and symptoms, the power of psychiatric diagnostic categories (both Western and traditional) to name and to occult at once other conflicts, and the implicit criticism expressed by so-called local healing knowledge and its epistemologies. These issues, by emphasizing the importance to explore other ontologies, help to understand the perplexity and resistance that GMH and its agenda meet among many scholars and professionals, who denounce the risks of reproducing and globalizing Western hegemonic values concerning health, illness, and healing. Keywords ''Palimpsest nature'' of psychiatric disorders Á Hegemonic dimensions of psychiatric diagnostic apparatus Á Crypto-racism Á Indocile suffering Á ''Minor'' and ''subjugated'' (healing) knowledge
Culture, mental health and psychiatry
While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as “brain disease,” there has also been an increasing awareness of the contingency of psychiatric diagnoses. In this course, we will draw upon readings from medical and psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry, and science studies to examine this paradox and to examine mental health and illness as a set of subjective experiences, social processes and objects of knowledge and intervention. On a conceptual level, the course invites students to think through the complex relationships between categories of knowledge and clinical technologies (in this case, mainly psychiatric ones) and the subjectivities of persons living with mental illness. Put in slightly different terms, we will look at the multiple links between psychiatrists’ professional accounts of mental illness and patients' experiences of it. Questions explored include: Does mental illness vary across social and cultural settings? How are experiences of people suffering from mental illness shaped by psychiatry’s knowledge of their afflictions?