Towards a Cultural-Clinical Psychology

For decades, clinical psychologists have catalogued cultural group differences in symptom presentation, assessment, and treatment outcomes. We know that 'culture matters' in mental health - but do we know how it matters, or why? Answers may be found in an integration of cultural and clinical psychology. Cultural psychology demands a move beyond description to explanation of group variation. For its part, clinical psychology insists on the importance of individual people, while also extending the range of human variation. Cultural-clinical psychology integrates these approaches, opening up new lines of inquiry. The central assumption of this interdisciplinary field is that culture, mind, and brain constitute one another as a multi-level dynamic system in which no level is primary, and that psychopathology is an emergent property of that system. We illustrate cultural-clinical psychology research using our work on depression in Chinese populations and conclude with a call for greater collaboration among researchers in this field.