Description
In recent years, scholars and practitioners in the mental health field have highlighted the limitations and hegemony of variables-based epistemologies and scientific methods in capturing, understanding, and replicating culturally-relevant mental health practices for culturally diverse clientele. Many multicultural scholars and practitioners have moved toward studying pluralizing epistemologies and learning from contextualized narratives of those who are living multicultural lives. In an effort to embody this new wave of research, this study gleans fresh understandings on cultural insights as it relates to counseling from the narratives of mental health professionals who live in multiple cultural and social contexts. Based in tenets of Social Constructionism, Narrative Identity Development, and multilingualism as a marker of diverse cultural knowledge, this phenomenological study examines the l/Linguistic and clinical practices of multilingual Asian American mental health practitioners serving non-English speaking clientele in the United States of America. This study incorporates Visual Research Methodology and Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the participants’ linguistic practices in counseling contexts beyond English across different Languages (e.g. Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, Vietnamese). The participants narratives converge on three main findings: 1) depth of cultural insight that is related to but distinct from Language proficiency and content mastery, 2) recognition of mental health practices in the U.S. and its specialist language (i.e. Therapyspeak) as a culturally and historically specific practice, and 3) complex and multilayered information processing (i.e. Context Filtering) involved in counseling across cultural and l/Linguistic gaps. These findings suggest that tracking and examining l/Linguistic practices provide a new entry point in understanding the complex influences of culture within the counseling process that will inform the next evolution of culturally relevant practices in mental health services. Keywords: culturally relevant practices, context filtering, multilingualism, multicultural counseling, translanguaging, counselor education
