Cultural sensitivity: making trauma assessment and treatment plans culturally relevant

The Asian tsunami on December 26, 2004, has had a profound impact on the mental health of large numbers of people in several South Asian nations. Many psychological interventions with relevance to this disaster have been shown to be effective in a Western context. For these psychological interventions to prove effective in the tsunami-affected regions, they must be understood and accepted by health-care practitioners and patients in their individual cultural settings and must be adapted to these settings on the basis of careful dialogue between health-care professionals, community and religious leaders, and patients. Religious, socioeconomic, and other cultural influences all affect the acceptability and success of various psychological assessment and treatment tools. The cultural specificity of these tools needs careful validation in the tsunami-affected countries. The challenge in each local situation is to find the optimal means of adapting tools such as cognitive-behavioral therapy into appropriate strategies for local communities. We advocate a culturally sensitive approach to ensure that the impact of interventions is optimized to benefit the communities recovering from such a traumatic disaster.