The way that we are raised and the things that we do are very different from one and another. Am very familiar with this because I was raised in an island called Puerco Rice. My culture and values are completely different from most of my friends and coworkers, but the beauty of being so different from everyone is that I get to learn from others and vice versa. Throughout history people have been grouped and people have placed themselves into groups.
From the raggedy of Nazi Germany dividing people into race to grouping preschoolers who like chocolate vs. vanilla people have been grouped. When speaking more scientifically, grouping has often been based on culture, race, ethnicity, and gender. Culture is a collection of behaviors and traditions of a group of people. It encompasses both the tangible and intangible things about population. There are things like how society defines family or how people worship, people’s favorite pastime, and music.
In short it’s what binds a people group together as a people group it’s what makes them, them. It is important to remember that although culture may be affected by biology, it is not determined by it. It seems like we can’t help to make assumptions and judgments about people from different cultures. We judge others by their actions without knowing their intentions and yet we judge our actions by our intentions because we know our intentions, but we are unaware of other people’s intentions. We do all do this without realizing that we are doing it and that is because it is our human nature.
Just like dogs sniff their owner’s friends because it is unsure of the intentions of the stranger, we humans perceive ourselves to assumptions and judgment cause we are not sure of other people. A way that we can stop making assumptions is to realize that we are doing it and saying that our actions are wrong. In the field of diversity we need to train ourselves just like we have trained ourselves to create alliance and all of those books that we have read to gain skills. We are capable of training ourselves to stop ourselves from making judgments and train ourselves.
When it comes to cultural competence and diversity in the work environment there are cases of discrimination against race, pregnant women, transgender people, disabled people etc. This is why it is very important that cultural diversity is taught in all workplaces. Culture is a true part of organizational life that can be conveyed by a number of practices including: Oral and written communication such as presentations and memoranda. Organizational structure as reflected by line and staff relationships. The way power and status are defined both formally and informally.
What is measured and controlled such as time and quality. Formal policies and procedure found an employee manual and official communication. Reward systems such as compensation plans and supervisory techniques. Culture competence is the ability to serve people in an appropriate way. So whoever comes through your doors you’re able to treat with the level of respect and dignity that they deserve, and that they perceive that the service that they get is done in a way that is comfortable and are met with their standards.
The reason why cultural competence is important is because we have such disparities in this country when it comes to behavioral health services. If we can ensure that our providers do everything that they can in a culturally competent manner then we can reduce those disparities. Cultural destructiveness is characterized y intentional attitudes, policies, and practices that are destructive to cultures and consequently to individuals within the culture. Cultural incapacity is the lack of capacity to help minority clients or communities due to extremely biased beliefs and paternal attitude towards those not of mainstream culture.
Cultural blindness is the belief that service or helping approaches traditionally used by the dominate culture are universally applicable regardless of race or culture. These services ignore cultural strengths and encourage assimilation. Cultural pre competency is the desire to deliver quality services and committed to diversity. Demonstrated by hiring minority staff and recruiting minority members for agency leadership. However, this level of competence can lead to tokenism. Cultural Proficiency is characterized by holding culture in high esteem.
Seeking to add to the knowledge base of culturally competent practice by conducting research, influencing approaches to care, and improving relations between cultures that promotes self-determination. In conclusion we should be open minded to differences and having some background, and understanding that those differences exist and having knowledge of the diverse cultures. We should al be able to understand different cultures and different needs. I think that it is a lot more than understanding cultures and more about being accepting of others.
We should also be conscious and sensitive to the population of people that we are dealing with and also treat everyone with the same respect that we want to receive. What we should mainly focus on is providing the basic needs for each individual for example an individual who doesn’t understand English can be helped by an interpreter that understands their language. Little things that may seem simple can make a big difference for the overall experience of a client. The individual that I interviewed is a sexual abuse psychiatrist named Shelia Belie.
Belie is a psychologist at Gainesville, Florida. She does testing assessments and therapy work for both adults and children. People that will benefit from this are individuals with mental disorders, sexual problem and sex offenders. Sex offenders and considered developmentally disabled and mentally retarded. Belie also works with the children who are victims of sexual abuse. Belie also talks about the types of therapy that is practiced in her establishment. The modes of therapy include group therapy, family therapy, multifamily therapy, DEBT, ND play therapy.
Dialectical behavior therapy (DEBT) is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy that is used as an effective treatment for mental health disorders like personality disorder, depression, and anxiety. Her biggest challenges are money. Mondays and Thursdays are spent on the counties and the rest of the week is spent in the center. Testing and assessments would happen for children that have been sexually abused. These tests can last for up to 16-20 hours and then a report is written based on the occurring. Medicaid is one of the insurances that allow Belie to develop programs that are cutting edge.
Other insurances will only fund for office based counseling as opposed to Medicaid that will fund for both office and at home counseling. Belie mentions that one of the problems in this field is that the field is moving to 20% office based and 80% outside the office. More work is being done outside than inside the office and a change needs to happen very soon so that children are not left out just because there is not enough funding. Human service professionals are going to provide the support, plans, and action to help that the families meet their needs.
In this career path others will definitely have the satisfaction of being able to aka a child safer. For some, helping sex offenders might not be as satisfactory, but we need to realize that sex offenders have a mental disorder and are in need of our services. Working in this position is very difficult, but can be rewarding when improvements are seen. Belie says that trauma is like the main thing going on in the mental health field in the form of child psychical, mental abuse, neglect, and family violence.
Really bad serious things that are disturbing children over a long period of time are the bulk of the mental health problem. Belie says that if you’ve learned that your role in life is to be an object of sexual SE by others, you just kind of learn that pattern and it carries on until it gets interrupted by some kind of recovery process. When our children are abused whether psychically, emotionally, those scars stay with children for a lifetime. It later manifest itself in under-performing children in school they potentially act out and may get involve with law enforcement and other problems and they lose hope in their life.
Children that don’t get treatment or talk about what happened eventually are unhappy for the rest of their lives and do not trust others. These children often times end up in a path of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, promiscuity, ND prostitution. There are real life threatening consequences from being a victim of sexual abuse. Belie says that sexual abuse was associated with multiple common psychiatric disorders. Specifically anxiety disorder, depression disorder, eating disorder, suicide attempt and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In a subgroup analysis it was found that most of those associations stood whether the abuse occurred in adulthood or childhood. Furthermore, these associations when data was available also stood whether the abuse occurred in men or woman. Abuse history is strongly correlated with multiple psychiatric outcomes ND for physicians the presence of psychiatric disorders in addition to health care utilization should really prompt a discussion or investigation of abuse history and referral to a psychiatric professional for treatment.
