FRHD 4310 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Mental Health Professional, The Counselor, Cultural Diversity
22 Oct 2018
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Document Summary
Chapter four multicultural perspective and diversity issues. One of the major challenges facing mental health professionals is understanding the complex role cultural diversity and similarity play in therapeutic work. Clients and counselors bring a wide variety of attitudes, values, culturally learned assumptions, biases, beliefs, and behaviours to the therapeutic relationships. Some counselors may deny the importance of these cultural variables in counseling; others might overemphasize the importance of cultural differences, lose their spontaneity, and thus may lose contact with their clients. Due to each of us coming from a unique blend of cultures and identities, all counseling interactions can be seen as multicultural events. Working effectively with cultural diversity in the therapeutic process is a requirement of good ethical practice. Mental health practitioners must avoid using their own group as the standard by which to assess appropriate behaviour in others.
