The Culturally Infused Engagement (CIE) Interview: A Complementary Interview for Contextualizing Client Distress and Help-Seeking

Abstract Despite decades of attention to racial and ethnic disparities in mental health, communities of color seek less formal mental health services than their White counterparts. Particularly, engagement in formal mental health services continues to be a structural and cultural challenge for communities of color, whose mental health experiences are shaped by multilevel socio-ecological systems, including structural, cultural, community-level, and interpersonal factors. Ethnic and sociocultural differences between clients of color and their therapists can result in numerous barriers, including clinician cultural gaps, socio-cultural alienation, distrust, and mental health stigma. This calls for approaches that consider and integrate clients’ cultural contexts and explanatory models into clinical assessment and treatment. Guided by the Culturally Infused Engagement Model (CIE), we introduce the Culturally Infused Engagement (CIE) Interview as a contextually and culturally responsive mental health assessment framework that honors the varied, contextualized, and culturally impacted lived clinical realities of clients from diverse cultural backgrounds. The CIE Interview has implications for inclusive clinical practice, including enhancing clinicians’ use of culturally responsive assessments and strengthening therapeutic alliances with clients.