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“Shattering culture”: perspectives on cultural competence and evidence-based practice in mental health services.
- Source :
-
Transcultural Psychiatry . Apr2015, Vol. 52 Issue 2, p198-221. 24p. - Publication Year :
- 2015
-
Abstract
- The concept of culture as an analytic concept has increasingly been questioned by social scientists, just as health care institutions and clinicians have increasingly routinized concepts and uses of culture as means for improving the quality of care for racial and ethnic minorities. This paper examines this tension, asking whether it is possible to use cultural categories to develop evidenced-based practice guidelines in mental health services when these categories are challenged by the increasing hyperdiversity of patient populations and newer theories of culture that question direct connection between group-based social identities and cultural characteristics. Anthropologists have grown concerned about essentializing societies, yet unequal treatment on the basis of cultural, racial, or ethnic group membership is present in medicine and mental health care today. We argue that discussions of culture—patients’ culture and the “culture of medicine”—should be sensitive to the risk of improper stereotypes, but should also be sensitive to the continuing significance of group-based discrimination and the myriad ways culture shapes clinical presentation, doctor–patient interactions, the illness experience, and the communication of symptoms. We recommend that mental health professionals consider the local contexts, with greater appreciation for the diversity of lived experience found among individual patients. This suggests a nuanced reliance on broad cultural categories of racial, ethnic, and national identities in evidence-based practice guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
- Subjects :
- *ATTITUDE (Psychology)
*ATTRIBUTION (Social psychology)
*CONCEPTS
*CULTURE
*DEBATE
*DISCRIMINATION (Sociology)
*ETHNIC groups
*GROUP identity
*HEALTH attitudes
*HEALTH services accessibility
*MEDICAL practice
*MENTAL health services
*PHYSICIAN-patient relations
*CULTURAL pluralism
*RACE
*REFLECTION (Philosophy)
*SOCIAL classes
*STEREOTYPES
*EVIDENCE-based medicine
*PROFESSIONAL practice
*LABELING theory
*SOCIAL context
*HEALTH equity
*CULTURAL competence
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 13634615
- Volume :
- 52
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Transcultural Psychiatry
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 101811983
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461514557348