Culturally Competent Family Therapy: A General Model

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The problems of a family are often conditioned by the cultural issues its members face, regardless of their socioeconomic background. However, most therapeutic models ignore this important factor. Ariel's book offers a model for diagnosis and therapy that incorporates cultural issues. It provides clinicians and trainees with readily applicable concepts, methods, and techniques for helping families and their members overcome difficulties related to intermarriage, immigration, acculturation, socioeconomic inequality, prejudice, and ecological or demographic change. This approach enables therapists to analyze and describe a family as a cultural system, explain its culture-related difficulties, and design and carry out culturally sensitive strategies for solving these difficulties. The model introduced in this book integrates theories in family therapy in general and culturally oriented family therapy in particular with ideas drawn from many other fields, such as cross-cultural psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and linguistics. The form of therapy presented in this book is integrative, drawing from traditional curing and healing techniques employed in folk psychotherapy and medicine, in addition to more conventional therapeutic models. Every technique is modified to be adapted to the cultural character of the family in question. This book is designed to be a handbook for clinicians and a textbook for students, trainees and researchers. It can be used as a guide for a complete independent method of family therapy and also as a source of ideas and techniques that can be incorporated selectively into other forms of therapy.

Reviews

"A much needed volume that places the enterprise of family therapy squarely in the cultural context. Building on the author's earlier work in information processing models, Dr. Ariel provides the reader with an outstanding set of conceptual tools for enhancing family therapy practice in an increasingly ethnoculturally diverse world."-Ronald F. Levant Co-Author Masculinity Reconstructed Dean, Nova Southeastern University Former Editor, Journal of Family Psychology
"In this book Ariel has promulgated a fascinating and clinically useful model for conducting culturally competent family therapy. This comprehensive volume could well become essential reading for those engaged in treating multi-cultural patient populations, as well as those teaching and supervising about this seminal issue in today's society."-Florence W. Kaslow Kaslow Associates, P.A., Palm Beach Gardens, FL President, Family Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association
"Sensitive, creative, and intellectually rigorous--a remarkable combination. Shlomo Ariel's treatment of culturally sensitive therapy addresses some of the most important and most neglected sources of dysfunction and healing in families."-Israel W. Charny Professor of Psychology and Family Therapy Hebrew University of Jerusalem Past President, International Family Therapy Association
"Shlomo Ariel's Culturally Competent Family Therapy is a path breaking book, intellectually demanding on the reader for its sheer sweep, while at the same time setting clear signposts for practicing family therapists, pointing the way towards more culturally aware case formulations and treatment planning....I thoroughly recommend this book as a general integrative framework which allows any therapist or counselor to examine their own values, beliefs, and ways of working, be this with individuals, families, couples, or groups."-Hilde Rapp Chair of the British Initiative for Integrative Practice
"[S]uccessfully brings out a well thought-out culture competent family therapy approach; using a very innovative method that makes the book an interesting document to read to the end; and for the therapists, a very unusual, innovative, structured way of dealing with the process of helping multicultural populations."-Journal of Psychology in Africa
[S]uccessfully brings out a well thought-out culture competent family therapy approach; using a very innovative method that makes the book an interesting document to read to the end; and for the therapists, a very unusual, innovative, structured way of dealing with the process of helping multicultural populations.-Journal of Psychology in Africa
Ariel addresses this timely and important matter in an articulate and well researched fashion....Ariel's volume will be most relevant to practicioners and those training to be family therapists.-Choice
The book would be valuable to a variety of mental health professionals who work as individual. couple and family therapists, or in social and health agencies, but more particularly to those of us who live and work in a multicultural society, a situation that is becoming more prevalent in our world.-Transcultural Psychiatry
"Successfully brings out a well thought-out culture competent family therapy approach; using a very innovative method that makes the book an interesting document to read to the end; and for the therapists, a very unusual, innovative, structured way of dealing with the process of helping multicultural populations."-Journal of Psychology in Africa
"The book would be valuable to a variety of mental health professionals who work as individual. couple and family therapists, or in social and health agencies, but more particularly to those of us who live and work in a multicultural society, a situation that is becoming more prevalent in our world."-Transcultural Psychiatry
"Ariel addresses this timely and important matter in an articulate and well researched fashion....Ariel's volume will be most relevant to practicioners and those training to be family therapists."-Choice
.."successfully brings out a well thought-out culture competent family therapy approach; using a very innovative method that makes the book an interesting document to read to the end; and for the therapists, a very unusual, innovative, structured way of dealing with the process of helping multicultural populations."-Journal of Psychology in Africa

Author Bio

SHLOMO ARIEL, a licensed expert and supervisor of clinical psychology and marital and family therapy, is the co-director of the Integrative Psychotherapy Center in Ramat Gan, Israel. He is also the Coordinator of Research and Academic Development at the Israeli branch of Lesley College, Boston, Massachusetts, a member of the faculty of the Program for Advanced Studies in Integrative Psychotherapy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and the chairperson of the Israeli Association of Psychotherapy Integration.