The implicit ideology of Western superiority: culturally adapted psychotherapy as a colonial practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to critically deconstruct culturally adapted psychotherapy (CAP) from a decolonial framework. This article draws from the anthropological frame of psychotherapy as an indigenous cultural healing practice of the EuroAmerican West to indicate how and when CAP risks continuing the legacy of colonization and the persisting ideology of Western/White supremacy. This conceptualization views CAP as a product of Western culture that is still inextricably imbued with Western culture and that necessarily requires transmission of Western cultural products. If one accepts these premises, classifying CAP as a potentially colonial practice should be apparent. The use of CAP could devalue a client’s non-Western cultural heritage and continue the marginalization of effective healing practices from the individual’s own culture. Before moving ahead with CAP, the practitioner should assess the degree to which the individual endorses the cultural components underlying the Western institution of psychotherapy. This can be done, for example, by considering variables such as the endorsement of Western and non-Western values, colonial mentality, and Western cultural mistrust. But ultimately decolonizing CAP requires elevating effective culturally indigenous healing practices to equal status with CAP in their own regard as recommended alternatives for many non-Western and non-European descent individuals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".