Why is it important that health and mental health professionals and the persons who instruct them develop cultural awareness?

There are two very important reasons.

First, we can acquire a much deeper self-knowledge when we are able to understand the basis for our own beliefs, actions, and responses toward others.

Second, and even more important, we live in a world in which there are myriad different cultures that inform the beliefs and behavior of others. Cultural awareness is the first step in becoming proficient in working well with people from a variety of cultures.

By understanding the cultural genesis of our own and others’ beliefs and behaviors, and by remaining open to the idea that other people’s cultures guide them in the same way that ours guides us, we as health and mental health professionals, policy makers, and educators will have a better chance of interacting positively with, and appropriately serving, people of varying cultural backgrounds. Such understandings are particularly important for health and mental health professionals and administrators because cultural perspectives and beliefs profoundly affect all aspects of people’s behavior with regard to health and well-being.

Cultural awareness is a critical feature of effective health and mental health policy, planning, resource allocation, and service delivery across the entire spectrum of care, including health promotion and prevention.

This is so because cultural perspectives inform people’s identification and interpretation of symptoms and define the diseases, illnesses, and disabilities they recognize. Culture also shapes their ideas of appropriate treatment. Salient and meaningful interventions cannot be created without an understanding of how the interventions will be interpreted and understood through the cultural framework of different individuals and populations.

Culture creates people’s expectations of health and mental health care providers and guides their enactment of sick role behavior. Further, familial and caretaker behaviors are defined by culture. Culture gives meaning to pain, suffering, and death. Without an understanding of culture’s impact on concepts surrounding physical and mental health and illness, as well as interpersonal relations, a health or mental health care professional may have difficulty planning efficient and effective care for, and providing such care to, individuals from cultures other than his or her own.

Without an awareness of the possibility that cultural issues may be at work, providers may be puzzled at patient resistance, lack of adherence, or seeming disinterest in health and mental health promotion, services, and supports.