Serving Latino Families Caring for a Person with Serious Mental Illness

What do mental health practitioners need to know about providing culturally relevant services for Latino families dealing with severe mental illness in a loved one? In this chapter, we will review salient sociocultural issues that practitioners and program managers need to consider in the design and delivery of quality care for Latino families with a member diagnosed with schizophrenia and other related disorders. We will examine pertinent research and practice areas on: the caregiving ideology characteristic of Latino families, cultural issues that affect Latino family participation in services, family involvement in services in the early stages of the illness, and psychoeducational approaches with Latino families. We will draw from our experience in the development of a culturally based psychoeducational intervention for Spanish-speaking families and discuss the applicability of a cultural exchange framework for increasing the cultural fit between family and provider cultures. Finally, the practice implications of an approach that prospectively takes into account the cultural strengths and resources that families bring into treatment are addressed.