Читать книгу Counseling the Culturally Diverse - Laura Smith L. - Страница 83

Many traditional cultures—among them, American Indians, Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinx Americans—hold varying concepts of what constitutes mental well‐being, mental illness, and adjustment to life. For example, Chinese and Latinx cultures do not always make the same Western distinction between mental and physical health as do their White counterparts (Guzman & Carrasco, 2011). Thus, problems of well‐being that mainstream American culture would consider to be psychological may be referred to a physician, priest, or minister (i.e., not a psychotherapist) within some cultures. Similarly, culturally diverse clients may enter therapy expecting the therapist to treat them in the same manner that a doctor would, and to offer them immediate solutions and concrete tangible forms of treatment (advice, medication, consolation, and/or confession). Conventional therapists sometimes interpret these expectations as resistance or as unrealistic wishes for a “cure,” when they are more accurately understood as a cultural worldview in which one's emotional well‐being is understood to be inseparably bound up with other aspects of the self.