Cultural Considerations in Caring for Persons with Mental Illness

Abstract

Most of the growth in the U.S. population over the next 50 years will take place among those currently categorized as racial and/or ethnic minorities. Although diversity is not new to the USA, its many complexities, and the ongoing changes in the population, present challenges to researchers, educators, social and mental health service providers, and policy makers . Many of the challenges arise from differences between dominant American culture (White, middle-class, protestant, heterosexual) and the many competing cultures within the USA that are associated with minorities, such as racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and social class categories. These other cultures are considered “competing” because their very existence is juxtaposed against the many pressures—social, medical, economic , religious—of dominant American culture to assimilate. Indeed many of the institutions established by the dominant culture, such as schools, hospitals, and the mass media, facilitate/encourage/demand (both implicitly and explicitly) assimilation of diverse members of society. However, assimilation is not desired by many minority group members. Therefore, they resist the pressures of the dominant culture and aim to survive within contested and marginalized space. The competition between dominant and nondominant cultures is not only for limited resources, but also for a claim to right personhood—to the ability to view the world through a different cultural lens without being labeled other, wrong, ignorant, misfit, crazy.