Culturally sensitive therapy: an anthropological approach

Abstract

This paper offers a model for culturally sensitive therapy for responding to cultural diversity in (mental) health care1. Culturally sensitive therapy cannot be based on pure comparative ethnographic data and on the development of technical skills. This would lead to too many ethnic based theories and the salience of multiculturalism would become trivialized. The idea of a culturally sensitive therapy thus affects the potential for a ‘crisis of relativism’. In our approach culture is no longer considered as a static, reified concept but as a process, a contextual creation, and the social construction of meaning. This implies an intersubjective perspective in which the clinician’s and the patient’s behaviour, thoughts, and feelings become a field of interaction that operates on multiple levels, within which the patient and clinician work to construct (cultural) meaning. In this perspective the cultural elements in the processes of transference and countertransference are very important. It also should be clear that mental health, in models for diagnosis and treatment, should no longer only look for the physical, social, and psychological dimensions but also for the cultural.