Special Interests
While I enjoy working with individuals facing a variety of challenges, my special interests are in addressing acculturation in my work with newcomers, foreign workers, international students, issues of adjustment, and mental health for multicultural clients.
Addressing Acculturation and Issues of Adjustment
As I wrote at the beginning of this course besides being a full-time student, I am also an immigration consultant. I have been working with landed immigrants, refugees, temporary foreign workers, and international students for a numbers of years and this is something that I have always dreamed of doing. As years have passed, I came to realize that these people not only need the services that I have already provided them with, but also counselling services pertaining to their physiological and psychological well-being. The services that this segment of people need are various, as it depends on the class of immigration they came under. The prolonged application waiting times put enormous pressure on them and by the time they come here, many of them are already suffering from all type of physiological and psychological. Hence, I must be cognizant of how processes such as acculturation to different groups can influence individual clients because acculturation level can vary significantly between generations, groups and within a single family unit. Take the example of parents who may maintain close ties to their roots while their children are exposed to the mainstream culture through school attendance and general exposure to outside influences (Gushue & Sciarra, 1995) and therefore therapists who work with these families may have difficulties connecting with less acculturated parents.
Addressing Health in Multicultural Clients
When working with newcomers, I am using the biopsychosocial model for conceptualizing health that provides a holistic perspective to health which takes into account not only a person’s physical illness and symptoms, but also their overall life experiences. This means that clients are seen in their contexts and not just what is going on with them physically and emotionally, but what their relationships are like, how much support they have, their roles in their communities and how all that fits together to present and represent the person I am seeing in front of me. The biopsychosocial model suggests that the interdependent factors such as biological, psychological and social factors end up influencing each other and feeding into each other in an interdependent way. Hence, illnesses can be caused by any number of factors that would on their surface appear to be independent from one another. Similarly, as one factor tends to influence the other factors, it is possible to have a physical reaction to a social or psychological stressor, and vice versa. In order to assist my clients with the best services that I can, I need to use self-awareness as a therapeutic tool while deciding which aspects of biological, psychological, and social domains are important to understanding and promoting the client’s health. When clients understand why their body act or react in a certain way, they are able to understand how things like stress and fatigue may cause for example, an increase in pain or how stress management can help decrease stress.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gushue, G. V., & Sciarra, D. T. (1995). Culture and families: A multidimensional approach. In J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A. Suzuki, & C.M. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of multicultural counseling (pp. 586–606). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.