The United States has a poor record in meeting the mental health needs of its minority populations. By focusing on individual pathology and relying on the white male as norm, practitioners have provided an ethnocentric and ineffective means of treating their culturally diverse clients. No longer can mental health problems be regarded only in terms of disabling mental illnesses and identified psychiatric disorders. They must also embody harm to mental health linked with perpetual poverty and unemployment and the institutionalized discrimination that happens on the basis of race or ethnicity, age, sex, social class, and mental or physical handicap. In its report, the President's Commission on Mental Health indicated that mental health services and programs must focus on the diversity of groups in U.S. society and satisfy the groups in terms of their special needs.
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January 1984
This article was originally published in
Explorations in Ethnic Studies
University of California Press