Clinical Handbook of Transcultural Infant Mental Health

J. Martin Maldonado-Duran · Andrés Jiménez-Gómez · Maria X. Maldonado-Morales · Felipe Lecannelier

Sep 2019 · Springer Nature

About this ebook

This handbook provides a review of relevant topics concerning the interface between culture and mental health, with a particular focus on child-rearing practices and transcultural issues in the perinatal period, infancy, and early childhood. It discusses how to work with infants and families from diverse backgrounds and addresses the most common issues that medical and mental health experts may encounter when working with individuals from other cultures. Chapters examine the considerable range of child-rearing strategies and how families from various cultural groups approach issues such as infant sleep, feeding practices, and care during pregnancy. In addition, chapters address conditions that are seen mostly within a particular sociocultural context and are “culture bound” syndromes or states. The handbook concludes with the editors’ recommendations for future research directions.

Topics featured in this handbook include:

• Prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping within the clinical field.
• Cultural responses to infant crying and irritability.
• Cultural issues in response to chronic conditions and malformations in infancy.
• The healthy immigrant effect.
• The use of folk and traditionally therapeutic remedies.

The Clinical Handbook of Transcultural Infant Mental Health is an essential resource for researchers, clinicians and related professionals, and graduate students in infancy and early child development, child and school psychology, pediatrics, social work, obstetrics, and nursing.

About the author

J. Martin Maldonado-Duran, M.D., is an infant, child, and adolescent psychiatrist and family therapist. He is Associate Professor of psychiatry at the Menninger Department of Psychiatry, Baylor College and works at the complex care service in the Texas Childrens Hospital. . He is also an adjunct professor of infant psychopathology at Kansas State University and a clinical professor at the Kansas University School of Medicine. He was formerly a researcher at the Child and Family Center of the Menninger Clinic for several years. He edited the book Infant and Toddler Mental Health, published by American Psychiatric Press, and has co-edited or edited five additional books in Spanish on topics of child and infant mental health. Dr. Maldonado has written numerous papers and book chapters on topics of child development and psychopathology in several countries.

Andrés Jiménez-Gómez, is a developmental neurologist at the Department of Neurology of Baylor College of Medicine. His work is based now at the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood, Florida. He has written numerous articles and papers on multiple aspects of child neurology, pediatrician’s education and global health. He is a founding member of AREPA an association of Latinamerican Pediatricians that foster the education and exchange of pediatricians in the Americas.

Maria Ximena Maldonado-Morales, MSW, MPH, is a social worker and psychotherapist at the Emotional Trauma Center at the Texas Childrens Hospital and formerly at the Women’s Place Center for Reproductive Psychiatry, the Pavilion for Women, at the same hospital in Houston, Texas. She has a Master’s in Social Work and a Master’s in Public Health from the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. She has worked with Latino immigrant families in Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri as a social worker, as well as a middle school teacher in Houston, Texas. Ms. Maldonado-Morales’s areas of interest include working with mothers and infants, women’s perinatal mental health, and working with immigrant families.

Felipe Lecannelier, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for Studies on Attachment and Emotional Regulation at the Universidad de Santiago, Chile He has undertaken postgraduate studies at University College London, the Anna Freud Center and the University of Minnesota. His areas of research and public health work focus on bullying, early socioemotional development, the socioemotional development of children raised in orphanages, abused children, foster care and prevention of emotional and behavioral difficulties in young children. He teaches actively in South America and Europe and has published numerous articles and several books on topics of child development, attachment, and substitute caregiving.