Introduction

The United States is a profoundly multiethnic country. Increasingly, it is realized that the presentation of psychological distress, and its treatment, is influenced in important ways by culture. The current special issue aims to explore how culture impacts on the treatment process—from distress presentation to mechanisms generating distress to the manner in which mechanisms generating distress must be addressed. In this Introduction to the special issue, I will summarize the contributions, and give some sense of how they illustrate the importance of culture in the treatment process.