Borders of belonging: challenges in access to anti-oppressive mental health care for Indigenous Latinx gender-fluid border-youth

Abstract

Many voices have called for decolonizing psychology as a profession and underscored the necessity of building and utilizing a counseling framework that rejects the rigidity of the gender binary and is mindful of the intersectional positionality that implicates subjectivities in complex vectors of oppression, invisibility, and marginalization. But how does one integrate and apply these complex constructs in a culturally relevant clinical practice? The gap between theory and practice appears to have widened, by both action and omission. Moreover, a myriad of clients run the risk of becoming re-oppressed by hegemonic practices in mental health services in Canada. Gender-fluid youth without immigration status who speak languages other than English are either pathologized or rendered invisible by academic discourses and clinical training practices in university settings. Using a critical approach to personality psychology and drawing upon extensive field research, this work discusses the challenges faced by Indigenous Latinx border-youth in accessing anti-oppressive mental health services in Toronto, Canada. The study conducted between 2010 and 2016, in which six Indigenous Latinx gender-fluid youth were interviewed, employed a qualitative narrative inquiry methodology and used a narrative story map tool to analyze data. Grounded in these research findings, this article highlights the necessity of implementing a culturally relevant and social justice–based training model for mental health care providers. Such training must include an ongoing critical examination of the socio-political underpinnings that ground clinical psychology’s epistemology, rather than adapting hegemonic therapeutic models and practices to a “population at risk.”