Culturally responsive

The purpose of this guide is to provide information to Australian Mental Health services, practitioners, Primary Health Networks and other on what good practice looks like in working effectively with people from CALD backgrounds. It is intended to provide practical advice and guidance for mental health service providers.  This guide was developed by the Embrace Project and published in August 2020

Orygen has created a collection of resources about cultural diversity and mental wellbeing. The resources were developed to support the knowledge and skills of the youth mental health workforce, to work safely and inclusively with multicultural young people. 

This guide includes two principles for improving communications. It explains different ways to communicate, depending on your organisation’s capacity. It also includes examples of good practice multicultural communications. This guide focuses on multicultural communities, but its principles can help everyone. Published by the Victorian Government, 1 Treasury Place, Melbourne.

This resource provides information about culturally informed ways to support the mental health of refugee and asylum seeker children. It aims to support practitioners from a range of mental health, social work and community-sector backgrounds who work with children and families from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds.  This resource is based on national and international research evidence. It does not include information about children or families seeking asylum who are in immigration detention.

Mental health services and individual workers who work within them will often have very different understandings and explanations of mental illness from consumers who are from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. Culturally responsive workers must seek to understand the illness experience of CALD consumers in order to gain their trust and respect, determine shared priorities, and plan and implement sensitive and effective intervention, treatment and recovery. By Mental Health in Multicultural Australia (MHiMA), 2014