Keynote: Ethical Care for Immigrant Communities

Mental health professionals increasingly serve clients from immigrant communities who face unique challenges including migration-related trauma, language barriers, acculturation stress, and systemic discrimination and institutional trauma. This workshop equips counselors with essential knowledge and skills to provide ethically sound, culturally responsive, and advocacy-informed care.  

Participants will explore ethical dilemmas specific to immigrant mental health contexts—including confidentiality concerns related to immigration status, informed consent across language barriers, and dual relationships in close-knit communities. Through case examples and interactive discussion, attendees will learn practical advocacy strategies for connecting clients to resources, addressing systemic barriers, and intervening on discrimination and “political” determinants of mental health.  

The workshop provides tools for adapting evidence-based, trauma-informed assessment and treatment approaches to account for diverse cultural conceptualizations of mental health, migration experiences, and family dynamics. 

Objectives:

•  Apply Culturally-Informed Ethical Decision-Making Participants will be able to identify and navigate ethical dilemmas specific to immigrant populations (such as confidentiality concerns related to immigration status, informed consent across language barriers, and dual relationships in tight-knit communities) using established ethical frameworks while honoring cultural values.
• Implement Advocacy Strategies Within Clinical Practice Participants will be able to integrate advocacy skills into their therapeutic role, including connecting clients to legal and community resources, addressing systemic barriers to care, and recognizing when to intervene on issues of discrimination, trauma, and social determinants of mental health.
• Adapt Evidence-Based Treatment Using Culturally Responsive Approaches Participants will be able to modify assessment and intervention strategies to account for cultural conceptualizations of mental health, migration-related trauma, acculturation stress, and family dynamics while maintaining therapeutic effectiveness and cultural humility. 

About Dr. Cynthia de las Fuentes:

During her graduate school training, Cynthia de las Fuentes was awarded a United States Congressional Fellowship through the Women’s Research and Education Institute and another fellowship with the Women’s Program Office of the Public Interest Directorate at the American Psychological Association (APA). She earned a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994 and subsequently became licensed by the State of Texas in 1996. From 1993-2007, she was a tenured associate professor of psychology at Our Lady of the Lake University, an APA accredited doctoral program, and held numerous leadership positions within the university and department including serving as Training Director. Since 2007, she has worked in private practice offering sliding-scale consultation, psychotherapy, and forensic evaluations focusing her expert testimony on the victims of hate crimes, racial, gender, and sexual orientation discrimination and immigration evaluations. Her pro bono work includes training bilingual psychologists in her community on the cultural and linguistic competent delivery of forensic and immigration evaluation services to the Latiné immigrant community and delivering self-care and stress management workshops to immigration lawyers and their staff. She has dozens of presentations and publications in her areas of scholarship: ethics in psychology, feminist psychology, multicultural and Latiné psychologies. She is active in governance of the APA where, among other positions, she served as president of the Society for the Psychology of Women, was a member of the Board of Education Affairs, was chair of the Committee for Women in Psychology, served on the APA Council of Representatives representing Division 45, the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race, was chair of the Council Leadership Team, and as a member of the Policy and Planning Board. She is a founding member of National Latinx Psychological Association and was elected a member and secretary of the Board of Trustees for the Texas Psychological Association. She was the 2024 President of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Association Services Inc.