ABSTRACT
The United States is now an ethnically complex society. The demographic changes that have taken place in America during the past five decades have given rise to a country where cultural and ethnic diversity is becoming the rule, rather than the exception. These changes are also evident in the field of mental health, where psychiatrists and other practitioners are finding that “a patient-therapist cross-cultural dyad now constitutes the modal unit” ( Arce, 1993). Psychiatrists treating recent immigrants should always ask themselves the following questions: To what part of the United States has the person immigrated? Which racial, cultural, socioeconomic, or climactic variables has the immigrant encountered and how do these differ from his or her own?
