The study of culture and mental health is an interdisciplinary endeavor with a long history, but psychology has only been fitfully involved with the ongoing conversation. One problem is that the anthropological view of culture, not as independent variable but as deep context, is unfamiliar to psychologists and can even appear to undermine supposed psychological universals. Cultural psychiatry has increasingly endorsed this view, and represents a fruitful ongoing collaboration between anthropology and medicine. Psychology has been much slower to adopt a similar approach. Although anthropological views have influenced researchers in cultural psychology, profoundly in some cases, collaboration between cultural and clinical psychology remains uncommon. The goal of our original paper in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, and of this teaching and learning guide, are to promote exactly this.

In some ways, Cultural-Clinical Psychology is not new. Psychologists have conducted research on culture and mental health for decades, but this particular integration of cultural and clinical psychology is just beginning to emerge as an organized field of study. Most of the resources listed here draw from long-established disciplines that have contributed to Cultural-Clinical Psychology: cultural, cross-cultural, and multicultural psychology; cultural psychiatry; and medical anthropology. Regardless of the theoretical origin of the paper or the specific content, our selection is guided by the search for a common starting point. The assumption is that scholars interested in specific cultural settings or clinical phenomena will then be able to pursue these topics through focused literature searches.

The original version of this online teaching and learning guide has been published by Social and Personality Psychology Compass (Ryder, Ban, & Chentsova-Dutton, 2014). While the published resource will not change, this online version will be updated on an ongoing basis to reflect new developments in the field.

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