Conceptualizing culture in (global) mental health: Lessons from an urban American Indian behavioral health clinic

The movement for global mental health (GMH) has brought perennial questions about human diversity in mental health to the fore through heightened debates over if and how established knowledge, institutions, and practices should be altered for ethical and effective interventions with diverse peoples around the world. Kirmayer and Pedersen (2014) encouraged dialogue between GMH scholars and communities considered for intervention to address differences and concerns about colonialism. American Indian mental health offers an instructive site for global mental health inquiry to understand frameworks that might facilitate this desired dialogue. Here, we draw from a clinical ethnography in urban American Indian behavioral health conducted between September 2014 and February 2015 to glean insights into a popular response to these differences: Incorporating Indigenous cultural forms into clinical practice. Our findings highlight a predicament this response presents to mental health professionals. They can either eschew their clinical training and its cultural assumptions to take up new lives enabling their representation of Indigenous cultural forms, or they can hold onto their professional training and modify what is clinically familiar to appear culturally different. Rather than a purposeful decision, in the clinic contextual factors-tacit assumptions, clinic structures, and popular culture concepts-powerfully shaped clinical practice and reconfigured Indigenous cultural forms to support familiar clinical processes (e.g., treatment-planning). Although potentially therapeutic, culturally repackaged mental health practices are not the therapeutic alternatives called for by many Indigenous communities, and when advertised as such, risk harmful appropriations and misleading reticent people into participating in culturally prescriptive interventions. Lessons for global mental health point away from incorporating Indigenous cultural forms into clinical practice, which is likely to result in cultural repackaging, toward ethnographically-informed dialogue of differences to inform models for medical and epistemic pluralism providing interested communities more culturally commensurate mental health services alongside well-supported Indigenous therapeutic alternatives.

The influence of person traits on lawyer selection among British adults

The present study examined selection criteria for lawyers among British adults, which begins to overturn a dearth of studies examining this issue among legal professions. A total of 122 participants were asked to rate eight lawyers dichotomized along lawyer origin (Britain versus South Asia), gender (women versus men), and age (younger versus older). A mixed-design analysis of variance showed that there was a main effect of lawyer origin, with British lawyers preferred over the South Asian counterparts. There were also a number of significant interactions between lawyer variables, as well as participant gender and age. The effect sizes of these interactions were generally smaller (ηp(2) = .07-.24) than the main effect lawyer origin (ηp(2) = .54). Limitations and practical implications are discussed in conclusion.

Culture and Self in Career Development: Working With American Indians

The career development concerns of American Indians continue to receive limited attention in the vocational or career literature. To address this deficit, the current article will apply the cultural formulation approach to career counseling with American Indians. This article presents information on factors related to cultural and self-identity for American Indians, followed by a discussion of a culturally informed perspective on career concerns. A discussion of therapeutic issues and a case study of a young Lakota woman are provided. The article concludes with suggestions for how to approach the case using the cultural formulation approach.