Therapeutic Interventions with Ethnic Elders

Provide effective services to ethnic elders with culturally competent training!Therapeutic Interventions with Ethnic Elders: Health and Social Issues provides culture-specific information to health and social work professionals. You will explore distinctive qualities that are found in ten different ethnic groups to help you better serve these populations. The historical events that have shaped these elders’often-adverse reactions to mainstream providers are also included. Ideas on how to effectively approach these situations are included to improve your skills with a diverse population of clients. The information in Therapeutic Interventions with Ethnic Elders is invaluable to health care administrators who plan services and hire personnel to work with various ethnic groups. The book also functions as a training tool to increase the awareness of staff members who currently work with ethnically diverse populations. You will learn to recognize culturally driven behaviors in ethnic elders and how to make appropriate interventions. Some of the general and culture-specific issues that Therapeutic Interventions with Ethnic Elders addresses are:

• helping ethnic elders to feel comfortable utilizing your services
• appropriately modifying therapy to meet the individual's cultural background
• reinforcing a new sense of independence for these elders by helping them understand available services
• understanding cultural inhibitions in Japan that hide, deny, or ignore mental illness
• realizing that traditional Euro-American psychotherapy techniques cannot be readily transplanted and applied to all other cultures
• addressing depression, anxiety, increased illness, intergenerational conflict, and even marital conflict combined with the stress of assimilation and acculturation among Russian emigrants
• understanding folk beliefs and the importance of the role of the church for many elder African-Americans

Therapeutic Interventions with Ethnic Elders addresses the need for practitioners, agencies, and institutions to understand and respect the different characteristics of each elderly minority population. You will examine the unique historical contexts of Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, African, Russian, Navajo, Yaqui, Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican elders and explore the stress factors that come with immigrating, such as finding a peaceful place to live and being confronted by age discrimination and racism. This important book explains cultural behaviors to provide you with effective suggestions for providing optimum care to the ethnic elders in your life.

Sara Aleman, Tanya Fitzpatrick, Thanh V Tran, Elizabeth Gonzalez