ENHANCE TREATMENT APPROACHES
Ready to enhance your clinical work with FGCS?
Wondering which approaches to use?
Most counseling centers utilize a short-term and solution-focused framework. When adapted to the unique identities of FGCS, the following treatment approaches improve engagement and retention for FGCS who bravely seek services.
Integrative approach
This approach allows you to pull from your training (CBT, psychodynamic, relational, trauma-informed, intersectionality, etc.) to create individualized services for your FGCS.
Integrative psychotherapy is a process in which clinicians intentionally draw from multiple treatment theories to provide individualized services while maintaining adherence to those respective theories (Norcoss & Goldfried, 1992).
Cultural Humility
Cultural humility is a process and journey in which clinicians view the clients as the experts on their lived experience. Clinicians then utilize their own clinical training to collaborate with the clients to achieve the desired outcome. This approach also requires self-reflection and advocacy.
Three Dimensions of Cultural Humility
1. Lifelong learning & critical self-reflection – be curious & open
It is a journey, not a destination
Acknowledge our own limitations
Ask and not assume
2. Recognize and challenge power imbalances
Acknowledge and neutralize the power in our spaces
3.Institutional accountability
Advocate for our system to honor and practice this philosophy
Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI)
The CFI is a clinical tool that explores multiple dimensions of a client's identity while gathering essential factors that impact the client's concerns and coping strategies.
The CFI's emphasis is also on cultural factors.
These are necessary components in exploring, assessing, and caring for FGCS.
3 main components of the CFI
Core CFI
4 domains to engage and elicit culturally appropriate definitions, causes & context, coping, and help seeking factors.
CFI - informant
Similar to the Core CFI to engage and elicit information from family, care giver or social support
Domain 1: explores cultural definitions of the problem (questions 1-3).
Domain 2: explores cultural perceptions of the context, cause, and support (questions 4-10) (including cultural identity).
Domain 3: explores cultural factors that impact coping and past help-seeking (questions 11-13) to include barriers to help-seeking.
Domain 4: explores cultural factors that impact current help seeking (questions 14-16) including clinician-patient relationship.
*The informant version has 1 additional question regarding the relationship to the client.
12 supplementary modules
Each module explores specific cultural domain or population.
Module 1: Explanatory Model
Module 2: Level of Functioning
Module 3: Social Network
Module 4: Psychosocial Stressors
Module 5: Spirituality, Religion, and Moral Traditions
Module 6: Cultural Identity
Module 7: Coping and Help Seeking
Module 8: Patient-Clinician Relationship
Module 9: School-Age Children and Adolescents
Module 10: Older Adults
Module 11: Immigrants and Refugees
Module 12: Caregivers