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Defenses  Suicide Assessment  Cultural Caveat When working with
clients of different cultural groups, you have to be careful
that you do not pathologize behaviors that are normal in their
culture. Textbook examples include diagnosing a Native American
as psychotic because he is talking to dead relatives.
Culturally, this may be accepted in his tribe as a way to
process their death and grieve. Alternately, diagnosing an
African American mother living in a low-income high-crime
neighborhood as having paranoid ideation for thinking everyone
around her was dangerous and could hurt her children would be
just as irresponsible.  Cultural sensitivity goes a bit further
though. Consider three factors: varying base rates of mental
disorders in different ethnic groups the effects of racism
Varying Base Rates of Mental Disorders Zhang and Snowden (2000)
studied mental disorders in over 18,000 adults collected through
an NIH study. They found: African Americ