Training as mental-health professionals is supposed to be "color blind". That sounds fine but in practice it means that people from black and ethnic groups get an unfair treatment because their particular problems are seldom acknowledged.
So a project was piloted involving Bangladeshi women in inner-city London, most of whom migrated to the UK in the 1960s and 1970s from a rural background. Many of these women turned to their doctors with common symptoms of anxiety, such as headaches, sleeping difficulties, loss of appetite and lack of energy. They were usually prescribed tranquillizers or even Vitamin C since the underlying causes remained, the women visited their doctors with increasing frequency and some were referred on to mental-health professionals.
The psychologists wanted to see how normal Western approaches to anxiety problems might work when applied across cultures. However, they found that many things in the standard approach had to be changed. They had to translate many of the usual examples—they would normally compare learning to relax with learning to drive, for instance, which would not have been culturally appropriate. At first they asked the women to rate, on a scale one to ten, the effect of relaxation on their level of anxiety. They found numbers an odd way of expressing how they were feeling. So psychologists shifted their focus to words and talked of five stages form "very good" to "very bad".
As it was a pilot project, there were shortcomings. Psychologists looked for too little back-up and did not collect as much objective data as they might have done with a white group. They fell into the white stereotype of assuming that Bangladeshi women would find the use of various checklists and written records foreign. Perhaps racism has conditioned the professionals to a greater extent than they expected. Psychologists found that using a Western model across cultures has potential. But it needs political, financial and personal commitment.
The standard approach to treating anxiety had to be changed because ().
A. the cultural background of the women was very different from the standard one
B. the Bangladeshis were exposed to racist harassment and language difficulties
C. the Bangladeshi women asked them to change it
D. the women could not relax
