Vida Alegre: Teaching Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Spanish

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 twosemester 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.