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PMH 505: Multi-Cultural Issues In Counseling

3 credits

This course focuses on theoretical models, research, and techniques and interventions for working with diverse populations in various settings. Issues to be addressed include worldviews; cultural transference/counter-transference; acculturation and acculturative stress; racial/ethnic identity; family acculturation conflicts; culture-centered interventions; community empowerment; prejudice-reduction techniques; multicultural supervision; and multicultural training models.

Learning Goals

Because it is not possible to gain even minimum therapeutic cultural competence in a didactic course, this class is also designed as an experiential practica. Participatory attendance, readings, and verbal class presentation of a 4 to 8 page paper written on your ethnic, racial, and class identifications and what ways you have discovered how they impact in the treatment process. This will entail students examining his/her own family history at least as far back as their great-grandparents. It should also include an awareness of any historical or “Chosen” Trauma and how this has impacted you as a person and as a clinician. The paper should also include a case narrative on a treatment process with a patient that is experienced and perceived as an “Other” and what you learned about your self as a result of that clinical process. We will have a few guest speakers on race and ethnicity; however, I will not be able to necessarily coordinate them with the reading assignments.

Sections Offered: Fall 2026

Sections Offered: Summer 2026, Summer alternative