Vida Alegre: Teaching Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Spanish

ABSTRACT

Bilingual social workers need specialized training to provide effective mental health services to Spanish-speaking Latinos. Ideally, this training should use the language in which the social workers plan to practice. This article describes an innovative two-semester course offered in Spanish that prepared advanced undergraduate and graduate students to use a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) intervention (Vida Alegre). In the first semester, students learned CBT methods using Vida Alegre training materials. In the second, they conducted a service-learning project that included facilitating a CBT group under the supervision of an instructor. We review their challenges and lessons learned and provide future recommendations.

KEYWORDS:

• bilingual students
• therapy in Spanish
• cognitive behavioral therapy
• group modality
• Latino immigrants

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are very grateful to the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for its ongoing support of the education of bilingual Latino students. We also thank Stephanie Lopez and Annette Popernik, MSW, for their thoughtful feedback.

DECLARATION OF INTEREST

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This study of Vida Alegre was supported through a number of grants awarded to Lissette M. Piedra from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Campus Research Board and the Marjorie M. Monkman Research Award. Maria Pineros-Leano was supported in part by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under award number 2011-67001-30101.