ABSTRACT
Concepts of both race and culture are included in the term ‘ethnic’, and so a multi-ethnic society is both multicultural and multiracial. In attempting to explore the meaning of mental health in a multicultural setting, first, we need to see where we come from in terms of the culture of professional training-that is, to examine the origins of psychiatry and psychology, which, after all, have dominated and fashioned Western thinking about mental health and mental illness. Second, we need to appraise what we mean by saying that a society is multicultural, not forgetting how racism complicates the picture. Is it in fact realistic and appropriate to see different groups of people as ‘having’ different cultures and then seeing these cultures as, in some way, interacting with each other? Or is it preferable-more useful, more correct-to see all individual persons, or families, as culturally mixed, hybrid perhaps, with gradations of differences so that the margins between one culture and another are arbitrary-a matter of judgement affected by the model employed by the person making the judgement? Third, we need to determine the meaning of mental health in relation to culture in a context of racism, attempting to differentiate what is ‘cultural’ from what is ‘racial’.
