Masood Zangeneh - Culture, Diversity and Mental Health - Enhancing Clinical Practice

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If we have learned one thing from the many momentous events of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it is that our well-worn assumptions about people and the cultures in which we live our lives are due for a fresh look.

Culture, Diversity and Mental Health - Enhancing Clinical Practice is designed to help clinicians meet the complex needs of their clients at this time of critical reflection. Seventeen chapters, each of which offers a fascinating discussion in its own right, are assembled into a single volume of indispensable reading for todays practitioners. With its wide scope of important topics for clinical practice, Culture, Diversity and Mental Health - Enhancing Clinical Practice covers issues ranging from intersectionality to perceptions of disability, and from immigrant to Indigenous populations.

Part I, Intersectionality and Disability , begins on a broad note with Bramesfeld, Platt, and Bals chapter, Mental Health, Multicultural Competence, and Cultural Humility from an Intersectionality Framework. Here, the reader is introduced to the vital notion of going beyond individual categories of identity to understand how identities intersect, affecting each other to produce experiences that critically mold mental health outcomes. This idea of intersectionality is central to the second chapter, Archetypes of Black Womanhood: Implications for Mental Health, Coping and Help-Seeking, by Waldron. Setting forth stereotypical societal images of Black women, the author demonstrates how these representations have harmed Black women and contributed to the formation of a Black feminist consciousness that emblematizes Black womens position at the nexus of various social identities. The chapter further discusses how this consciousness affects Black womens experiences with mental illness.

Laying the groundwork for wider treatment of mental and physical challenges, Buettgen and Gormans chapter, Disability Culture, treats disability from a critical disability studies perspective. The authors explore and explode the myth of any essential disability that exists outside of its historical, cultural, and social context. In the final chapter of Part I, Deaf Mental Health: Enhancing Linguistically and Culturally Appropriate Clinical Practice, Bone examines the health inequities of a specific disabled community, namely the Deaf community. She reports on a range of barriers that Deaf people experience in accessing mental health services, including audism and clinicians inadequate understanding of Deaf culture and language.

Moving to Part II, Immigrant and Indigenous Mental Health , in Best Practices and Research Perspectives Working with Immigrant Groups, Mercado, Venta, and Irizarry propose considering both cultural and psychological variables in an integrative model of health for different immigrant groups, including Latino immigration to the USA and global Middle Eastern and North African migrations. Following in these footsteps, Khanlou, Khan, and Mill offer, in the next chapter, A Health Promotion Framework for Women with Precarious Immigration Status in Canada. The authors propose a tripartite Health Promotion Framework for Women with Precarious Immigration Status. Next, in his examination of an extreme case of immigrant mental health, in Living in a Refugee Camp: The Syrian Case in Jordan Al-Krenawi tackles the searing context confronting Syrian refugee children in both camp and non-camp settings, including child marriage, child labor, and gender-based abuse. Concluding the immigrant section of Part II and narrowing the focus to Syrian refugee women, in Exploring an Islamically Integrated Peer Support Model for Muslim Syrian Refugees, Qasim and Hynie propose using the existing social support found at mosques to provide this population with Islamically integrated peer support groups as an alternative to traditional therapy.

Bridging the immigrant and Indigenous worlds, in The Impact of Cultural Beliefs on Mental Health Diagnosis and Treatment, Al-Krenawi shows how quality mental health care for migrant and Indigenous communities alike requires, first and foremost, culturally sensitive training for general health care workers.

Turning to Indigenous populations, Le Grande, Jackson, Ski, Thompson, and Brown inform us in their chapter, Depression, Cardiovascular Disease and Indigenous Australians, of mounting evidence on causal relationships between psychological distress, depression, and cardiovascular disease in Indigenous Australian communities. They specifically note intergenerational trauma and discrimination as crucial determinants of well-being. In their own contribution, Culture Through a Clinical Lens, Wesley-Esquimaux and Koptie engage with the lived experiences of Indigenous people, presenting a model that uses a medicine wheel developed by Wesley-Esquimaux to facilitate the identification of the impact of trauma and the move towards healing. Continuing the exploration of Indigenous mental health in Trauma and Its Impacts, Sutherland provides a lucid discussion on Indigenous individuals and communities negativity towards governments and authorities, which is an enduring and pervasive response to traumatic events such as enslavement, being forced off land, and the policies and practices of assimilation.