engleski

Cultural Sensitivity and Competence in Adolescent Mental Health Promotion, Prevention and Early Intervention

The present paper refers to relevant cultural issues in mental health, migration and resettlement from an anthropological and interdisciplinary perspective and the need for service providers to develop cultural awareness and understanding of a particular community’s concepts of mental health before engaging in health promotion, prevention or intervention. It is based on a cross-cultural study of displaced adolescents from post-conflict countries that has provided empirical data on problems connected to psychosocial adjustment and experience of young immigrants and refugees and identified a range of specific risk and protective factors associated with various settings (family, school, community). In order to contribute to the implementation of these results in view of more effective culturally sensitive promotion, prevention and early interventions specifically targeting mental health in adolescents another project was carried out to explore cultural awareness and competence of service providers and mental health literacy of youth and their families in 4 countries: Albania, Bosnia, Croatia and Italy. This paper summarizes the results of applied questionnaires and conducted interviews with various youth service providers in Croatia. The goal of this survey was to document the content of existing cultural competence programs, as well as to identify potential gaps. The team identified insufficient knowledge in cultural competence in service providers and either a lack of any curriculum or a lack of appropriate content in existing cultural competence programs. In view of these results specific education needs were defined and a program developed for appropriate policy and practice responses to the challenges of cultural diversity, which aims at promoting cultural awareness of health care and other service providers at organizational, training, education and service delivery levels and an understanding of the link between social macro issues, cultural values and mental health issues for young people.

anthropology; cultural competence; youth

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