Culturally competent psychotherapy
Kenneth Fung2003, Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie
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Abstract
To provide effective psychotherapy for culturally different patients, therapists need to attain cultural competence, which can be divided broadly into the 2 intersecting dimensions of generic and specific cultural competencies. Generic cultural competence includes the knowledge and skill set necessary to work effectively in any cross-cultural therapeutic encounter. For each phase of psychotherapy--preengagement, engagement, assessment and feedback, treatment, and termination--we discuss clinically relevant generic cultural issues under the following headings: therapist, patient, family or group, and technique. Specific cultural competence enables therapists to work effectively with a specific ethnocultural community and also affects each phase of psychotherapy. A comprehensive assessment and treatment approach is required to consider the specific effects of culture on the patient. Cultural analysis (CA) elaborates the DSM-IV cultural formulation, tailoring it for psychotherapy; it i...
Key takeaways
- To provide effective psychotherapy for culturally different patients, therapists need to attain cultural competence, which can be divided broadly into the 2 intersecting dimensions of generic and specific cultural competencies.
- • Cultural competence is the product of generic cultural competence and specific cultural competence; both are important in each phase of psychotherapy.
- In such cases, Figure 1 Generic and specific cultural competence in psychotherapy patient expectations about therapist insight may be at odds with some authors' admonitions about the value of therapists' displaying curiosity and cultural naiveté (10).
- Therapists can also use feedback as an opportunity to introduce the concept of psychotherapy to patients, who may not share the therapists' underlying assumptions (such as assumptions about the process and about the respective roles of therapist and patient).
- CA is used to help clinicians arrive at a culturally specific understanding of the patient's world view; it informs and interacts with all phases of psychotherapy.
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