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Clinical Assessment Tools for the Culturally Competent Treatment of Muslim Patients

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Islamophobia and Psychiatry

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Abstract

Over the past 30 years, cultural competence initiatives in mental health have evolved from a list of “dos and don’ts” based on clinician perceptions of a patient’s cultural background to ethnographic approaches that inquire about a patient’s cultural affiliations, conceptions of illness, and preferences for treatment to avoid group-level stereotypes. This chapter first reviews the rationale for cultural competence within mental health as well as cultural competence recommendations for Muslim patients. Next, it discusses the DSM-5 Outline for Cultural Formulation (OCF) and Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) as clinical assessment tools that can help clinicians ask patients about the cultural definition of the presenting problem; perceptions of cause, context, and support; self-coping and past help-seeking; and current help-seeking and treatment preferences. The OCF and CFI may help clinicians systematically and comprehensively develop diagnostic assessments and treatment plans for Muslim patients in a patient-centered way.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA

    Neil Krishan Aggarwal

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  1. Neil Krishan Aggarwal
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Correspondence to Neil Krishan Aggarwal .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Medical College of Wisconsin (Retired Tenured Professor), Milwaukee, WI, USA

    H. Steven Moffic

  2. Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    John Peteet

  3. Bedfordshire Centre for Mental Health Research in Association with Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

    Ahmed Zakaria Hankir

  4. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    Rania Awaad

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Aggarwal, N.K. (2019). Clinical Assessment Tools for the Culturally Competent Treatment of Muslim Patients. In: Moffic, H., Peteet, J., Hankir, A., Awaad, R. (eds) Islamophobia and Psychiatry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00512-2_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00512-2_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00511-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00512-2

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