New book on culturally diverse counseling

[kestrell]

I seem to recall speaking to someone about trying to find texts on this subject

Culturally Diverse Counseling: Theory and Practice (Sage, 2019)
Dr. Elsie Jones-Smith

Synopsis Culturally Diverse Counseling: Theory and Practice by Elsie Jones-Smith adopts a unique strengths-based approach in teaching students to focus on the positive attributes of individual clients and incorporate those strengths, along with other essential cultural considerations, into their diagnosis and treatment. With an emphasis on strengths as recommended in the 2017 multicultural guidelines set forth by the American Psychological Association (APA), this comprehensive text includes considerations for clinical practice with twelve groups, including older adults, immigrants and refugees, clients with disabilities, and multiracial clients. Each chapter includes practical guidelines for counselors, including opportunities for students to identify and curb their own implicit and explicit biases. A final chapter on social class, social justice, intersectionality, and privilege reminds readers of the various factors they must consider when working with clients of all backgrounds.

Comments

[siderea]

So, I finally got around to checking this out. It's... I want to be positive about this, what with being in favor of social justice, but it seems to be typical for its genre in the "strengths-based approach". It seems – obviously I haven't read it cover-to-cover, this is based on reading excerpts – to be trying to instruct the reader in the most woke, socially just, non-discriminary approach to the most pushy, bossy, high-handed, for-your-own-good, patient-blaming, missionary notion of counseling.

The sort of "counseling" this book presupposes is the one that's the archetypical know-it-all social worker comes in to tell the client how to shape up. It is an assumption of the book's descriptions of positive examples of counseling that the job of the counselor is to get the client to do things. To make, or convince, or trick, or force the client do what the counselor thinks they ought to be doing.

So it's about how to be a woke bully.

My extremely cynical take on the genre is that it's a self-serving psychological project of de-racializing the notion of "white man's burden" so counselors of color can freely participate in the enactment of the "civilizing the savages" dynamic, too.

ETA: for a nicely infuriating example, Case Vignette 1.2 on page 18. When I got to discussion question 7, I wanted to slap the author on Latisha's behalf.

ETA2: okay, I'm reading the LGBTQ chapter, and... I'm going to walk away before I break something.

[kestrell]

Why are restricting this description to race? Because it certainly sounds like almost every interaction I've ever had with the Commission for the Blind and the Carroll Center and, oh yes, UMass Boston's disabled students services office. Also, other blind people who work for these services, but use the same shaming and bullying tactics, so I'm not surprised to fin such a text in a library for blind and visually-impaired readers. This is why some of us go without services rather than subject ourselves to such "support" services.

[siderea]

Because I've yet to read a "resource" by a blind (or otherwise disabled person) that seemed to be engaged in the same self-justificatory psychological project; every time it's happened in my experience so far, the author(s) have been black or Asian.

While being a bully knows no limits, this particular desire to instruct in being a woke bully does seem to be specifically organized around race.

Based on my experience as a patient,

[jesse_the_k]

Rhoda Olkin's What psychotherapists should know about disability is the exception that proves the rule.

This book helped me understand how disabled people--including myself--behave in ways that can be read as "arrogant" or "thoughtless" when we're actually trying to make room to be ourselves.

[kestrell]

I try to put a disclaimer for when I mention a title that I haven't actually read, so now I'm mentally flogging myself. Gak.