What is a Cultural Comprehensive Approach to Therapy and Why It’s So Important

Our society is a beautiful, diverse patchwork of different personalities, character types, expressions, and experiences. Although this diversity makes life exciting and fulfilling, it also means that there are infinite ways in which trauma, disorder, and other mental health concepts may manifest. There is no one size fits all approach to therapy, so to provide the best treatment possible, we must have a culturally comprehensive approach. A culturally comprehensive approach means developing cultural competence while also exercising cultural humility.

Cultural competence would be considered a skill that can be learned, developed, and demonstrated. The idea of cultural humility focuses more on the lifelong development of self-evaluation and critique, the promotion of diversity, and de-emphasizing and de-centering one's cultural knowledge and experience.

In other words, the comprehensive approach aims to learn without assuming absolute knowledge; empathize and connect without being self-centered; become highly skilled and competent but also realize that we don't know everything, and there's always an opportunity to learn something new or be wrong or look at situations differently.

The synergy of cultural competence and humility creates the ideal environment for genuine patient-centered care and the development of innovative treatment. We are proud of this approach in how it's allowed us to connect with our growing, diverse population. We've been able to explore ourselves, our understanding and foster an environment where patients of any background feel safe, taken care of, respected, valued, and, most importantly, understood.

Yes - diverse patients need diverse therapists.

For Black people and other people of color and marginalized groups, having a therapist from the same or similar background can be a life or death difference. For many people, this idea may seem unnecessary or, at worst, ridiculous. They may say that “therapy is therapy” and thus should apply to everyone. Theoretically, in an ideal world, this makes sense, but unfortunately, this is not the case. This cultural disconnect is why a culturally comprehensive approach is so vital (you can link the other newsletter here) and why a diverse panel of therapists is critical to achieving a broad, diverse reach and providing the best care possible.

What is the problem? Where is the disconnect between patients from marginalized groups and therapists from opposite backgrounds?

Patients of color are more frequently racially misdiagnosed by medical practitioners, and many psychotic disorders are disproportionately overdiagnosed among Black and Brown individuals. These over- and misdiagnoses represent a discriminatory attempt to pathologize communities of color, stigmatizing and labeling symptoms of legitimate medical disorders and conditions as psychological faults. Additionally, patients of color, particularly young people, frequently do not obtain adequate mental health options that address the intersection of their cultural and psychological needs within the current mental health system.

It fills us with joy to look at our staff from various backgrounds, cultures, expressions, and experiences and know that we’re able to address this disparity in care and deep community need. We want our services to be the best possible, our outcomes to be healing and restorative, to build lives of fulfillment and joy, and for every one of our patients to be represented and to have an environment where they can be themselves safely, comfortably, and unapologetically.