The chapter on treatment interventions for immigrants, refugees, and their families describes the importance for clinicians to familiarize themselves with how to treat these populations given the changing demographics in the United States. It explains the cultural competence model, the cultural sensibility model, and the community systems of care model, as well as other variations of treatment that take into account cultural nuances. The chapter outlines specific recommendations to treat child, adolescent, and adult immigrants and refugees based on the Practice Parameter on Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Culturally Competent Care by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and other sources. These include how to overcome barriers to mental health treatment, the role of language barriers and how to overcome them, the generational challenges in treating the family, awareness of cultural biases and how to address them, understanding cultural idioms of distress in diagnosis and formulation, the need to assess and treat immigration-related losses and traumas and to evaluate acculturation-related family conflicts, identification of key family members in the treatment, and the need to design treatment interventions that are consonant with the cultural values and beliefs of the immigrant family. The need to provide evidence-based pharmacological treatments and to consider ethnopharmacological factors is addressed. Other evidence-based treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, testimonial psychotherapy, narrative exposure therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and others are discussed.
Improving access and systems of care for evidence-based childhood obesity treatment: Conference key findings and next steps