Respecting students and their eventual clients
Very little of that happens now, Consoli says. Few Spanish-speaking psychology graduate students receive professionally relevant education in Spanish, nor are they commonly supervised in Spanish—even if they expressly intend to work with Latinx clients, he says.
In fact, in a chapter he co-wrote in the 2020 book "Teaching Psychology Around the World, Volume 5opens in new window," Consoli says that bilingual graduate students often train alongside their English-speaking classmates "with the implicit (mis)understanding that it will be the students' responsibility to translate into Spanish the educational constructs and supervision directives. ... After all, they're the ones who are bilingual."
Consoli says that approach disrespects both the students and their eventual clients.
"Yes, we need to diversify the demographics of our field, but that's not what's going to guarantee better services" for Latinx clients, he says. "Multicultural competence and multicultural humility are crucial variables in the delivery of mental health services."
Consoli stresses that bilingual therapists do not have to be heritage speakers. "Allies are welcome," he says. He does want to see more Latinx psychologists, but for Consoli, that's a matter of social justice, and of mirroring the country's overall demographics.
Treating Latinx patients
Unrest and poverty in Mexico and parts of South and Central America have driven many people to come to the United States to find a better life, sometimes even in the face of resistance and hostility. Some who seek therapy here may be undocumented; they may have been tortured in their countries of origin—or they may have been the torturers, Consoli says. And they may have been treated badly here as well.
Consoli often serves undocumented populations as a practitioner, researcher, educator, and mentor. Right now, he is involved in an ongoing studyopens in new window of Mexican American families that have some children who are citizens, and others who are undocumented. About 4.5 million undocumented children and young adults under the age of 30 live in the United States.
Latin American psychologists have been working for decades to develop a framework for treating the people of their distinctive cultures, most of which were part of the Spanish Empire. Consoli says that some American psychologists know the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, author of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (1968), who articulated and disseminated influential tenets used in "liberation psychology," a pan-Latin American movement of the past half century that addresses the effects of post-colonial turmoil on the individuals who have grown up with it. (Brazil was a Portuguese colony.) But Consoli says even Freire's admirers may not know that his ideas continued to evolve up through "Pedagogy of Hope," written a few years before his death in 1997. And liberation psychology is only one of the approaches American psychologists who serve Latinx patients might want to know about, he says.
One size does not fit all
Diversity is nothing new in the United States, which has been folding immigrants into its so-called "melting pot" for hundreds of years, but Consoli says psychology has learned a great deal over the years about how to deliver more effective therapy to people from other cultures.
"What's new is this idea of the cultural self, of seeing ourselves as cultural beings," he says. For the professional, relating to clients from another culture requires awareness and knowledge of the culture, and the skill to address its influences.
"Diversity is an umbrella term," Consoli says. "One size doesn't fit all. In Guatemala, for example, there are 23 languages. When I work with people from these indigenous communities, I work with them in Spanish, but I have to respect that I am bringing the colonizing language to them one more time."
Consoli says he had to come to the United States "to appreciate how Argentine I was—how Porteño," he says, using a nickname for residents of Buenos Aires, Argentina's capital city and a major South American port. "When you're always in the same pond, it's hard to appreciate those differences."
His notions about masculinity and religion are just two of the issues that he noticed set him apart in his new culture. He sought out a therapist here as a graduate student and was matched with a fellow Argentine—a terrible fit, he says: "He made so many assumptions about what I was trying to say."
Consoli interviewed three therapists altogether, and finally chose an English-speaking man, "a representative of the majority culture, but he was humble enough to acknowledge his own lack of knowledge, and he welcomed me." That therapeutic relationship was a successful one, he says. " Yet I was fortunate in that I could express myself, for the most part, in English, and not only in Spanish."
Psychology is a young discipline, Consoli notes, but fortunately, "we are coming around to understand the principles that can be used to effect both change and stability in people's lives. Human beings are always grappling with problems of both—not one or the other. But for many of our clients, stability is the more important of the two."
