Question

Explain how client’s culture affects their use of mental and community health care services. Use one or two specific examples to explain your answer, either from your life experience or cultures you are knowledgeable about. Please cite the answer if the answer is not cited I cannot use it thank you, it is imperative that the answer is cited.

Answer 1

The client’s culture plays an important role in mental and community health care services. Culture refers to a groups shared set of beliefs, norms, and values, Because of common social groupings (e.g. people who share a religion, youth who participated in the same sport, or adults trained in the same profession) have their own cultures, it is imperative to understand the cultures of both client and clinician. But limiting this discussion to Client’s culture, I will be discussing how culture of a patient affects community and mental health care services.

The culture of the patient, also known as the consumer of mental health services, influences many aspects of mental health, mental illness, and patterns of health care utilization. One way in which culture affects mental illness is through how patients describe (or present) their symptoms to their clinicians. There are some well recognized differences in symptom presentation across cultures. Asian patients, for example, are more likely to report their somatic symptoms, such as dizziness, while not reporting their emotional symptoms.Similrly,cultures also vary with respect to the meaning they impart to illness, their way of making sense of the subjective experience of illness and distress. The meaning of an illness refers to deep-seated attitudes and beliefs a culture holds about whether an illness is "real" or "imagined," whether it is of the body or the mind (or both), whether it warrants sympathy, how much stigma surrounds it, what might cause it, and what type of person might succumb to it.

Culture relates to how people cope with everyday problems and more extreme types of adversity. For example, Some Asian American groups tend not to dwell on upsetting thoughts, because they believe that reticence or avoidance is better than outward expression. They place a higher emphasis on suppression of affect. On the other hand,African Americans tend to take an active approach in facing personal problems, rather than avoiding them . They are more inclined than whites to depend on handling distress on their own