Culturally Competent Treatment

Culturally competent treatment can be thought of as clinical conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation that privileges the shared and intergenerationally transmitted history, ontological (understanding of the nature of reality), epistemological (ways of knowing reality and truth), axiological (value standards), and teleological (purpose) orientations of the client. During the 1970s, counseling psychologists and counselor educators (mostly of color) began to collectively vocalize doubts about European American clinicians’ abilities to work effectively with ethnic minority populations. Out of this professional concern, the tripartite model of multicultural counseling competence was developed by Derald Wing Sue, Patricia Arredondo, and Roderick McDavis, and the multicultural counseling movement was born. In its original iteration, the tripartite model of multicultural counseling competence focused on the European American clinician’s development of cultural awareness of ...