American Indians and Culturally Sensitive Therapy

Abstract

Reviewing and putting together this last issue of my Journal of Multicutural Counseling and Development (JMCD) editorship was a high honor and privilege, particularly because the authors of this issue represent the oldest cultural group of the United States, American Indians, and whose scholarship included in JMCD represents current social conditions of U.S. indigenous people vis-a-vis modernist European American psychology and counseling. I first heard the authors present their research at the 2011 Winter Roundtable of Teachers College, Columbia University, and was convinced that the wider readership of JMCD, outside of a cross-cultural conference, would gain from reading about American Indian well-being, resilience, empowerment, mental health assessment, academic development, and social justice advocacy. The present issue’s articles made me question how American Indian healing might be translated into European American therapy practices. When I was training to be a practitioner in the 1980s, I had read that American Indians preferred Native American and client-centered therapies. On the other hand, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is currently the most popular practice in the United States, and its well-researched empirically supported treatments have the approval of managed care, third-party payers, and government research funding. Therefore, I searched the literature on the effectiveness of CBT with American Indians. In this introduction to the special issue, I refer to one particular article (Jackson, Schmutzer, Wenzel, & Tyler, 2006) whose findings were consistent with the researchand practice-based evidence that compose the present issue. CBT is a therapeutic approach that has been found to correspond with European American cultural views, making CBT a largely effective therapy for this population. The usefulness of this approach with American Indian clients is not entirely clear, however. Jackson et al. (2006) discussed the applicability of CBT with American Indians in comparison to European Americans, as part of an effort to assess if CBT is an appropriate therapy to use with this ethnic group, if certain aspects of CBT can be adjusted for American Indian clients, and whether one’s level of acculturation affects CBT’s effectiveness. The authors assessed American