Teaching Cultural Formulation

In 2013, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry outlined 13 principles of cultural competence to guide child and adolescent mental health clinicians.¹ The implementation of these principles through training of new clinicians and continuing education programs is a necessary but complex endeavor. The increasing recognition of the importance of culture in the diagnostic process offers an incentive to increase training in cultural psychiatry. In 1994, the integration of the Outline for Cultural Formulation in the DSM-IV acknowledged the relevance of culture for clinical practice.