Culture and Mental Illness: A Client-Centered Approach

I bought this book years ago when it first came out. It remains my favorite text on multicultural psychology, and it has plenty of clinical insights that I've never found elsewhere. Apparently, it didn't become a classic, but it SHOULD have, along with it's companion, "Meanings of Madness." I think it is just a little too brilliant and insightful to fit easily into the standard, stale multicultural zeitgeist. One of my favorite sections was on dissociation, yoga and meditation. If I'm not mistaken, the author's thinking in this area remains about 3 steps ahead of eveybody else's. The insights around psychosis were remarkable, too. You can pick up a standard text on multicultural clinical practice (e.g. Sue and Sue) and get all the standard basics of multicultural clinical psychology. Sue and Sue (and perhaps some other authors now) have written a fine textbook. But I look at their standard text as a very nice and reliable Buick, while Castillo's text is a classic Ferarri. Yes, this text is currently waaayyyy too expensive. I'm not sure why. But then again, it is great stuff, worth the price of admission. Ignore the price; ignore the publication date. If you love multicultural clinical psychology, and you want to take your understanding to the next level, then treat yourself. In the last chapter (Chapter 15), Castillo summarizes his contribution as follows: "In this book, I have taken an essentially anthropological viewpoint of mental illness, utilizing anthropology's deliberately holistic perspective and methodology, combining neurobiological, psychological, social, and cultural theories and data. I have specifically attempted to embrace a holistic, client-centered approach to assessment and diagnosis. In client-centered psychiatry, rather than diagnosis and treatment being concerned with a disease, diagnosis and treatment are concerned with an individual who has thoughts, emotions, a social context, and a set of cultural schemas. In this final chapter, I will define a client-centered model for psychopathology with an emphasis on the relationship between culture, brain plasticity, and mental illness." The above summary is true. The author thus provides a "client-centered" framework for understanding culture and mental illness. I'm not sure if the author's insights led to the framework, or if the framework led to insights. Either way, the book delivers interesting, thoughtful, and important ideas.