3 - (SYM 147) a Pilot Study of Remote Culturally Informed Therapy Groups: Increasing Accessibility and Palatability of Psychotherapy for Muslims Across Florida

Muslims living in the United States (MLUS) tend to underutilize psychotherapy despite a growing need (Ali et al., 2022; McLaughlin et al., 2022), but there remains limited research on how to combat this trend. Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT) is a manualized intervention rooted in cognitive behavior therapy that draws on clients’ beliefs, traditions, and backgrounds to develop nuanced coping strategies and techniques to improve quality of life and decrease distress (Weisman de Mamani et al., 2021). CIT has been recently adapted for transdiagnostic groups (Weisman de Mamani et al., 2022), and though made with the intention of serving all faith backgrounds, it has yet to be tested with MLUS clients. Prior investigations have identified multiple barriers to treatment-seeking in MLUS, such as structural barriers (e.g., insurance, cost, location), lack of cultural/religious understanding on the part of non-Muslim providers, mental health stigma, concerns about privacy, and unfamiliarity with available resources (Amri & Bemak, 2013; McLaughlin et al., 2022). In this pilot study of CIT for Muslims (CIT-M), we will present our adaptations of a remote, group therapy for Muslims across Florida which includes separate groups for people with serious mental illness and transdiagnostic difficulties. Based on previous literature, we will showcase changes in recruitment, screening, and therapeutic content, that are designed to increase accessibility and efficacy of the intervention. For example, creating connections with community-based coordinators who posted about CIT-M on Muslim chat groups significantly aided in recruitment. We hypothesized that CIT-M would demonstrate good feasibility and would lead to significant reductions in distress. In line with our hypotheses, we found that across sessions, clients indicated high satisfaction, with a mean of 6.0 on a 7-point scale. Preliminary data on distress and quality of life will also be discussed. Our results highlight that improvements in mental health care utilization among MLUS may in part be alleviated by community-based efforts, careful screening procedures that emphasize the privacy of all members, and tailored approaches that target Islamic religious coping. Future research would benefit from a randomized control trial that can more rigorously assess CIT-M’s efficacy. Finally, our findings may be especially useful for clinicians, who may benefit from learning targeted approaches they can implement that connect the Muslim community to available professional psychological resources.