14.1 Cultural Appropriateness of Therapy Approaches

The most widely used contemporary approaches to psychotherapy include cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based therapies, psychodynamic therapy, humanistic and person-centered therapy, and systemic therapy. In the United States and the West, the individual modality of therapy frequently takes the form of one-on-one meetings between a clinician and client on a regular basis (such as weekly or every other week) and emphasizes talking or verbalization of what is troubling the client. Therapy is sometimes delivered in a group modality as well, with one or two clinicians facilitating and a small group of clients facing similar problems meeting together. For example, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a treatment that is efficacious for many forms of distress, such as severe emotional dysregulation, suicidality, depression, and relationship difficulties, includes group skills work as one of its main treatment modalities. Regardless of individual or group modality, contemporary psychotherapy emphasizes individuals as agents of change for the mental health symptoms they experience. Furthermore, individual-level healing is emphasized, regardless of whether the disorder is understood to result from faulty cognition or learned maladaptive behaviors or to be rooted in the unconscious or otherwise. 

These approaches reflect a Western, individualistic bias, which may limit their utility for individuals whose cultural values are distinct. Research on local therapy models has demonstrated the importance of including conceptualizations such as the role that religion and spirituality play in therapeutic practices. For example, from an Islamic perspective, the human soul includes both divine and evil components; thus the Qur’an-based psychotherapy model (Abu-Raiya, 2015) aims to treat psychological symptoms by “taming the evil side and empowering the divine side” (Koç and Kafa, 2019).