Article summary:
- From 1 December 2025, new professional standards for psychologists will prioritise cultural competency.
- Psychologists must recognise privilege, power imbalances and their impact on client trust and wellbeing.
- Western norms (e.g. individualism, self-care) may not align with CALD cultural expectations.
- Missteps in advice (e.g. disclosing family violence to community leaders) can increase stigma or isolation.
- Interpreters should be carefully selected and briefed to ensure accuracy and confidentiality.
- Language matters – terms like “mental health” may not translate well and can perpetuate stigma.
- Enhance your cultural competency with this Introduction to cultural competence short course from APS.
- Add to your cultural competency skills with these two APS on-demand learning opportunities:
This December, new professional standards for psychologists will come into effect, which includes a strong focus on cultural competency. Here's what psychologists need to know.
On 1 December 2025, the new professional competencies for psychologists will roll out, and among these is a core focus on working with people from diverse communities.
To better understand why psychologists need to address cultural competency gaps in their training, and how to navigate assessing people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, the APS spoke with Dr Judy Tang, Director and Senior Neuropsychologist at Invictus Health.
Dr Tang is also one of Victoria's 12 Multicultural Commissioners at the Victorian Multicultural Commission, and a National Committee Member of the APS Psychology and Cultures Member Group. She also runs Solis, a capacity-building, support and resource network for multicultural mental health professionals and advocates.
“In a very practical sense, working with people who are culturally and linguistically diverse is absolutely essential, because it's a massive client base that you’ll be coming across,” she says.
Considering Australia’s vibrant cultural diversity, with 31.5 per cent of Australia’s population born overseas, understanding how to communicate effectively and ethically with people from CALD populations is more important than ever.
Dr Judy Tang
Points of power
As a first step, Dr Tang advises understanding how power and privilege affect a person’s life.
“Privilege and power converge and impact a person's experience of the world and how the world and society interact with them,” she says. “All these things compound, which impacts on mental health.”
If a psychologist is unaware of their privilege, this can alienate the client and lead to them feeling like they're not being understood, says Dr Tang.
In addition, she says, people who come from a dominant cultural background might not notice how society is set up in a way that makes it easier for them to navigate the system compared to people from cultural or religious minorities.
Power imbalances can come from other places, not just cultural or ethnic differences. Mental health professionals, for instance, should be aware of the ways their role intrinsically places them in a position of power.
“You already come from a place of authority in terms of knowledge and experience around mental health and psychology.
"If you have someone coming in who is from a marginalised group, who has gone through a life where they've come across barriers and difficulties such as racism, the psychologist needs to be mindful of whether they come to this with an even greater power imbalance, and how that might impact their work and the therapeutic relationship."
Given these vulnerabilities, it is essential to ensure such experiences are not unintentionally overlooked.
Norms and expectations
Dr Tang highlights that dominant Australian culture can exhibit norms that aren’t shared by people from CALD backgrounds. For example, she mentions that Western cultures often place an importance on individualism which isn’t a universal experience.
"For example, [the idea of] self-care – that you need to 'put yourself first'. Some cultures see that as not that helpful.”
Dr Tang also emphasised the importance of considering the potential impacts of giving certain advice.
"For example, in a family violence setting, psychologists may suggest to the client that they should speak to their community leaders for support. However, for someone from a small community, disclosing abuse may lead to stigma and isolation, or, if it results in a separation, this could leave the person with even fewer family or community connections than before."
Additionally, the impact of sensitive matters such as visa status should also be considered.
The close-knit nature of some cultural groups should also be considered within the therapeutic space, says Dr Tang. For example, when she is arranging interpreting services, she considers potential breach of confidentiality due to small ethnic populations.
"If a person is from an ethnic minority and is a non-English speaker, consider running the name of the interpreter by the client. There might be a chance that they know each other, in which case the client may not want this person to know their personal information.”
Learn how to work across cultures with the Introduction to cultural competence course from APS.
Being understood
Considering members of CALD populations often need interpreting services, getting that aspect right is an important part of providing care. Dr Tang has developed an induction document for interpreters that sets out the structures and expectations of their role before work with a client begins.
She will also sometimes debrief with the interpreter after a session to see if she missed or misinterpreted anything the client said, particularly in her medical-legal work or when looking through a neuropsychological lens.
“For example, if I don't speak another person's language, I might not know whether their sentence structure is coherent,” she explains.
“If the interpreter says something like, ‘They talk in very short sentences; they leave out particular grammar’, that helps me as a neuropsychologist to understand their language skills in their own language.”
Even in cases where the language barrier isn’t so great that interpretation is necessary, Dr Tang says it’s important to communicate clearly and effectively.
“In some languages, there is no word for mental health and wellbeing. In fact, for some, the closest word is ‘crazy’ or ‘going mad’,” she says.
“If I'm not careful with the language use, it can easily facilitate stigma. Especially if someone is experiencing a period of grief, and you talk about mental health, what they might hear is ‘you're going crazy.'”
That, she notes, can prompt an understandably defensive response.
“If I can, I try to educate myself around language and what might work [before the session].
“If there's no appropriate translation of mental health and wellbeing, I bring it down to the simplest and easiest concept to understand, which is happiness. Instead of saying, ‘Are you feeling depressed?’ or ‘Are you feeling anxious?’, I say, ‘Have you been feeling happy?’”
Such an approach allows her to open up further discussion. Talking about physical symptoms, as well, including headaches or fatigue, might help her spot symptoms of depression and anxiety.
In some cases, though, the best thing a psychologist might be able to do is take advantage of the increasingly multilingual workforce in the psychology sector and refer a client to someone who can speak their language.
Enhance your cultural competency skills with these two APS on-demand learning opportunities: Cultural competency: 1. Interviewing culturally and linguistically diverse adult clients; and Cultural competency: 2. Assessing youth, culturally and linguistically
Be ready
When working with patients from CALD backgrounds, Dr Tang finds preparation and research goes a long way.
“It's all about working with the client to find out what their needs are beforehand and, if possible, educating yourself so you're not coming in naive,” she says.
Clients very likely do not want to spend an entire session educating their therapist about their culture, she adds.
“I don't want to talk about my culture; I want to talk about my depression,” is how Dr Tang describes their perspective.
Nonetheless, she cautions against generalising too broadly and highlights the importance of adopting a person-centred approach.
Using herself as an example, she points out that as a Chinese Australian who was born here, her cultural identity is very different from that of a Chinese international student who arrived last year.
“At the end of the day, we as psychologists are in the business of working with people, and people come in all different abilities, skin colours, ethnicities, and religions.
"These factors impact every one of our perspectives on life, on processing and understanding emotions and on our mental health.”
Learn how to prevent suicidality in CALD communities with this APS CPD-approved short course.