Forging Caminos: Pathways to Becoming a Bilingual Mental Health Professional

This book is your roadmap to a career as a bilingual mental health provider, with guidance on training programs, conducting research, and building your practice.

Today over 60 million Latine individuals live in the US, more than 70 percent of whom are fluent in languages besides English. Disparities in health care are significant among this population, and there is a great need for qualified mental health providers to assess, diagnose, and treat both significant and everyday mental health concerns. Yet, less than 8 percent of psychologists are Latinx, with only 5.5 percent identifying as Spanish-speaking, and current standards of training, accreditation and competence for bilingual providers is woefully un-standardized.

This book aims to chart a new path forward for bilingual mental health in the United States. Editors Maciel Campos, Yessenia Mejia, and Andr廥 J. Consoli have gathered a prestigious group of scholar-practitioners who describe the current lay of the land in bilingual mental health care, with a focus on the graduate student and early career professional who is seeking a career as a bilingual mental health provider. Chapters describe the process of identifying and navigating graduate programs with an emphasis on bilingual approaches to training and care, conducting and publishing bilingual research, internship and post-doctoral training, and building a bilingual mental health practice. The unique experiences of Black and indigenous Latine are given particular emphasis throughout.