It is important for a health and wellness professional to maintain a career of long exploration of social and cultural diversity issues because our society is rapidly changing and diversity will always be a prevalent issue in many communities. As a health care professional, you don't want to be tone-deaf when it comes to cultural diversity and social injustices. As a mental health professional, you will be interacting with all kinds of people. You will need to have knowledge of their various backgrounds and their culture. You should not be dismissive of their race, religion, or anything regarding that person's life. Multicultural competence is expressed as "the ability to understand, appreciate, and interact with people from cultures or belief systems different from one's own". ("Importance of Multicultural Competence in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, n.d.)

Your client can be a black woman from a middle class background and she has trouble relating to anyone because no one in her family listens to her and they act like her feelings don't matter so she engages in spending her money recklessly on clothes and shoes because it makes her feel "something". Now she has lots of debt and nothing to show for it. As a white counselor, you shouldn't assume she is from a single parent home or she's poor or she has absolutely no self-control. Your client isn't stupid, she is trying to make up for the treatment she has been given her entire life. She wants to feel valued so she buys things she considers "valuable". She has her issues for good reasons. She isn't a statistic and she deserves the utmost respect.

Counselors must try to understand how Asians were raised and what their values are. They must try to study Native Americans or Indigenous people by really diving into their communities without disrespecting their culture and norms. If a counselor sticks to people who come from the some background and have the same ideology as them, the counselor isn't exploring social and cultural diversity issues that are prevalent in our time.

What can you conclude from the above?