You Can't Treat One If You Ain't One

Abstract

This article examines the increasingly frequent assertion (by representatives of so-called minority within the mental health movement) that particular experience/expertise is required to provide maximally useful mental health services to members of such subgroups. Spokespersons purporting to represent true ethnic minorities, women, religious, homosexual, and, more recently activity groups (e.g.) sports psychology have proposed that it is only as an individual provider who has shared the background, dogma, experience, and/or myths of a particular cultural sub-group can that professional provide the highest quality of mental health service. This article proposes that such that a point of view is theoretically unsound and that it is not the function of the psychotherapist to understand the of the patient/client in understanding what the patient/client's experience meant to the patient/client as an individual. From this perspective, it may well be that the therapist's personal partic...