Carmen Inoa Vazquez, Ph.D., speaks out about bilingual and bicultural mental health treatment and training

“The most important cultural factors” that need to be addressed in the “treatment of Hispanic individuals and/or families include the traditional values of machismo, marianismo, familismo, and personalismo,” states NYSPA member Carmen Inoa Vasquez, Ph.D. She is the leader of two major bilingual and bicultural treatment programs, The Institute for Multicultural Behavioral Health (IMBH) and the Bilingual Treatment Program (BTP) Clinic at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City. Her comments appeared in a front- page interview with Salud Mental, the quarterly newspaper of Mental Health News Education, Inc.

Machismo and marianismo “refer to gender specific behaviors that, in many instances, determine expectations on how someone should act on the basis of their gender,” explained Dr. Vazquez. “These cultural beliefs could hold a negative and a positive value.”

The value of “familismo, the centrality of and importance of the family, is also important when working with Latino families,” she continued. “All cultures value the family, but for Latinos/Hispanics, familismo includes the added dimension of the extended family – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, stepchildren, older children who have children of their own and the spouses of those older children living together as a unit.”

Responding to a question about the most important areas relevant to the training of bilingual/bicultural clinicians, Dr. Vazquez cited five areas: