What does it mean to be an effective and culturally sensitive counselor?

Sexual orientation.
What does it mean to be an effective and culturally sensitive counselor? While some may claim that displaying warmth and empathy and possessing good listening skills are the key ingredients, there is much more to it than that. For example, anyone can study the various models, theories, and counseling interventions and strategies, but our professional standards for multicultural counseling and advocacy competency encompass much more than this.
To be an effective and truly culturally sensitive counselor, you must be open to new groups that differ from your own; confront your biases, assumptions, and challenges; be willing to put yourself forward by direct exposure to the culturally diverse; and grow from these experiences. Only when you do this, you will appreciate and respect those who are culturally different.

When assessing clients, part of the initial diagnostic session involves not only recognizing the biopsychosocial dimensions and gathering adequate history of the client, but also includes a mental status evaluation and assessing various aspects of the client’s cognitive functioning, physical presentation, and high-risk behaviors. During the assessment, diagnostic, and treatment phases, counselors need to ensure cultural competence, and the client’s culture should be taken into consideration even when evaluating their mental status. As you complete your assignments during this course, be sure to research the mental status exam and acknowledge how cultural factors could impact this process.
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Assignment CULTURAL AWARENESS ASSESSMENT AND DIAGNOSIS
Overview
To increase cultural awareness and competence, we must start at the beginning when working with clients, and this process will continue until the client is discharged. This means that during the diagnostic assessment, we should carefully collect information while being culturally aware of the many considerations and factors that could impact the client and result in their presenting concerns and symptoms. This assignment will teach you the importance of acknowledging cultural factors, increase your cultural awareness, and work you toward becoming more culturally competent. It is an opportunity for you to evidence cultural sensitivity to assessment and diagnostic phases.
For this assignment, you will begin by choosing one mental health diagnosis recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). You will then identify two distinctly different populations giving consideration to cultural factors. Next, you will compare and contrast each population with regard to cultural considerations during the assessment and diagnostic phases. For this assignment, you will need to research and retrieve articles from the Capella library. The articles that will be most beneficial are those that pertain to specific populations with regard to assessment and diagnostic processes, taking the cultural factors of your identified populations into consideration. The following explanation and examples will help guide you through the assignment.
Preparation
To get started, choose one mental health disorder from the DSM-5. This can be a disorder of interest to you or a specialty area that you would like to focus on during your career. For this explanation, we will use depression as an example. Once you have chosen a disorder that will be the focus of this assignment and again later for the Week 8 assignment, you are ready to choose your populations that will be the basis for your comparison. The following populations will provide guidance when choosing your populations: 1) Hispanic female in her mid-40s presenting with depression and 2) Asian male in his teens presenting with depression. Once you have completed this preliminary work, you are ready to research.
Incorporate the following components into your paper.
Cultural Considerations for Assessment
You will research the disorder based upon the populations you chose and start with assessment considerations, including use of a biopsychosocial, a mental status evaluation, and two assessment tools. Using the disorder and populations in the example above, begin by researching biopsychosocial considerations for: 1) Hispanic female in her mid-40s presenting with depression and 2) Asian male in his teens presenting with depression. What you are working toward is learning to identify factors that could potentially impact diagnosis as a result of cultural considerations during the biopsychosocial.
You will ultimately want to compare and contrast cultural considerations between the two populations when assessing. When giving consideration to the information collected on the biopsychosocial, think in terms of views on disclosing information, symptom presentation, family structure and the roles and rules within the family, societal factors that could contribute to symptom development, religion, sexual orientation, et cetera. When giving consideration to the mental status evaluation, what does the research state about proxemics, non-verbal behaviors (for example, eye contact), perception, views regarding suicide, et cetera, among your selected populations?
Comparison of Two Assessment Tools
Now, choose two assessment tools based on the chosen disorder. In the example above, we chose depression. Useful tools for assessing depression could be the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D). Once you choose the assessment tools, you will want to compare and contrast use of the assessment tools, taking your populations of interest into consideration. An example is to compare and contrast the effectiveness of the BDI and HAM-D with Hispanic and Asian populations, taking the other cultural factors (sex and age) into consideration.
Cultural Considerations When Diagnosing
For the final section, you want to compare and contrast cultural factors for the populations of interest, taking into consideration the diagnosis you chose. For example, consider differences in how men and women present with depression and how this could potentially impact the diagnosis among these populations.
Here, you will also want to consider cultural factors related to the disorder. For example, what are the cultural values about mental health issues and the specific disorder you chose? You also want to keep in mind the diagnostic criteria and how this can also impact a diagnosis among certain populations. For example, if a female in her mid-40s presents with depression and there are diagnostics considerations to rule out general medical conditions, what could this mean diagnostically?

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