Smile Through the Pain: The Complexities of Narratives about Mental Health in the Black Community

The perception of mental health in the Black community is multifaceted. There are systemic challenges related to mental health that continue to stand as a barrier to receiving mental health services. Some of these barriers include accessibility of culturally competent providers, cost and/or lack of insurance to see a provider, and historical and present discriminatory [...]

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Neurocriminology: A Call on Marriage and Family Therapists and Allied Disciplines to Become Informed

Neurocriminology is an interdisciplinary subfield of criminology that incorporates methodological approaches from neuroscience, physiology, genetics, biology, and psychology. The goal of neurocriminology is to better understand, predict, prevent, and treat criminal and violent behaviors. Although there is no single determinant of such actions, neurocriminology strives to identify different risk factors that increase the likelihood of [...]

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Culturally Informed Marriage and Family Therapy with the Chinese Population

In light of the growing recognition of the importance for marriage and family therapists (MFTs) to be sensitive to their clients’ cultural backgrounds and memberships, this article is intended to provide several culturally-informed clinical suggestions for therapists applying Western-based MFT theories, models, and concepts to the Chinese population. When the authors use the term “Chinese [...]

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On the Horizons: Barriers and Trends in the Development of Systemic Family Therapy in Africa

Systemic family therapists (SFTs), usually called marriage and family therapists (MFTs) in North America, are trained to conceptualize individual, couple, and family distress within the broader relational and diverse intersectional contexts in which people live. Although the SFT movement originated in Western European contexts, it has since expanded across the globe (Roberts et al., 2014; [...]

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Creating Systemic Change Through a Social Justice Lens: Steps to Make Impactful Changes

Social justice is an evolving topic in marriage and family therapy (MFT) as the profession seeks to create this outcome in their clients’ lives and the systems in which they work. Many feel that creating systemic change is our work’s goal and responsibility. In the therapy room and as a leader, we are responsible for [...]

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Reasonable Suspicion – Probable Cause – Preponderance of the Evidence – Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

There are many evidentiary standards that have different roles and requirements in our legal system. The one with which practitioners are most familiar is, of course, the one associated both with duty to warn requirements and mandatory reports of child abuse or neglect: a reasonable belief of imminent harm/ reasonable belief that child abuse has [...]

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Culturally Informed Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples

Approximately one-third of African American couples in the United States are married. However, research indicates this population tends to experience higher rate of divorce, martial dissatisfaction, and single-parent households, when compared to other racial groups (St. Vil et al., 2019). One may ask, what patterns are we seeing with African American couples that lead to [...]

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Helping Black Women Heal Through a Womanist Mental Health and Healing Framework

Helping to heal What does mental well-being and healing look like for black women? How do we as clinicians support the mental health and healing of strong black women? I posture that a Womanist Mental Health and Healing Framework (Melton, 2022) can uniquely address these critical questions. Clinical psychologist Carmen B. Williams (2005) argues that [...]

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One Size Doesn’t Always Fit All

I love my “one size fits all” accessories! Especially my oh, so very comfortable leggings, a staple of my virtual therapy wardrobe! This issue of the Family Therapy magazine (FTM) delves into a topic that may not be so comfortable for many, whether you’re a Black therapist who has experienced your own racial trauma in [...]

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