Utilizing a Postcolonial Feminist Lens in Mental Health

• In Event: 1523 - Practice Symposium Roundtables
  In Informal Discussion Roundtable: Table 10: Sociology and Social Justice in Practice Settings

Abstract

The gap between how mental health work is taught in schools and the praxis of it is increasingly large as the popularity of evidence-based treatments rises. Despite sociology heavily utilizing and building upon concepts in queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and other identity-affirming concepts, the fields of psychology and counseling have been slower to integrate these concepts. Instead, mental health professionals selectively integrate only a few sociological concepts into a larger treatment model, and then, usually only tentatively. This process of pulling from relevant and crucially important sociological theories is slowed even further by the standardized and manualized treatment that health insurance companies expect. This means that mental health workers are decades behind the sociological research in terms of understanding the social construction of identities, systems of oppression, and issues of power and privilege with their clients. Unsurprisingly, clients largely receive ahistorical treatment models that reinforce androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and christocentrism. What then are sociologists who work within mental health to do in order to help shift the space(s) they are in towards providing appropriate levels of care? This session will pull upon experiences as a licensed marriage and family therapist and clinical program director in residential psychiatric treatment to identify the barriers to utilizing a postcolonial feminist lens in mental health.

Author

• Justin Huft