Establishing Good Rapport in Community Mental Health

Community mental health is a challenging and rewarding environment that requires particular skills, awareness of important sociological issues, and cultural humility. In this course, we’ll explore the role of CMHs in various community settings and discuss important issues for working with diverse populations in the midst of where they live, work, and interact with each other.

You’ll learn to:

• Understand the unique role of community mental health organizations and the work they do in serving the populations of these communities — including what’s involved in building trust and psychological safety for clients and the challenges you might encounter as you do so. .

• Contemplate the role of cultural humility in working in cross-cultural situations for building therapeutic alliances and engaging cultural differences, language barriers, and trust issues connected with race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender differences, so that your clients feel understood and respected.

• Discern the broader context of imbalance of power, marginalization, and cultural humility — including understanding your own role as an educated professional in the community you serve.

• Engage the broader community to build trust and unity, and invite collaboration with other community professionals and organizations.

Daisy Rios and Dr. Heidi Hutman serve on the panel with Dr. Carla Smith and share their experiences working in community mental health, They delve into the important issues that play a part in their everyday work that may not be as obvious if you haven’t engaged in this type of service.

Building good rapport with the community and practicing cultural humility is essential to being able to effectively provide counseling in a culturally diverse environment — whether that means serving a community with a different ethnic, racial, faith, sexual, or gender identity that creates or reinforces a sense of uniqueness and separateness.

Our panelists provide a lively insightful discussion on how to approach these issues respectfully with individuals and with the community as a whole in order to be a source of support.