Cross-Cultural Psychotherapy

Abstract

One of the major obstacles in the development of mental health services in large areas of the non-Western world is the difficulty in making culture- and language-specific adaptations of Western scientific approaches. Individual psychotherapy is a powerful tool in the generation of such culture-specific concepts; it can be a highly useful technique for transcultural psychiatry. Toward this goal the author proposes a basic model which involves two therapists, one representing each culture, together with additional consultation depending upon their degree of cultural "fit."