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i'm matthew
i'm 23 years old i'm a queer artist
living in montreal and i have
obsessive-compulsive disorder
elisha a 24 year old bisexual south
asian
with adhd anxiety and depression i'm
angel richards
90 year old singer songwriter i have
depression and anxiety and i'm living in
toronto
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intersectionality was first coined by
scholar lawyer
and researcher kimberly crenshaw in
1989.
put simply it's a framework for
understanding how a person's overlapping
social and political identities
impact their experiences in the world in
particular
it focuses on people with multiple
marginalized identities and the
different forms of oppression that
accompany them
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say you're a gay black woman
if you're and you're discriminated for
all those
three reasons you're going to have more
chance of developing a mental health
problems
because you're going to have more stress
and that's because you are at the
intersection of all these three
different
identities and you have to deal with
more discrimination because of that we
found that there's actually
not one mental illness that's
linked to discrimination but lots
because how stress acts on your body
and on your mind can be can vary
depending on who you are and what your
experience is
so for treatment to work clinicians have
to truly understand the identities
and the experiences of their patients
they need to understand their humanity
and so you can only imagine that when a
physician is not culturally competent or
if they don't truly contextualize their
patients experiences
how problematic this can be let's talk
about that term
cultural competency this refers to a
clinician's ability to interact with and
treat people across cultures
so what cultural competence is is the
set of skills
and practices that therapists learn
to make sure that the difference between
the way they see the world
and the way you see the world doesn't
get in the way
of you getting better
psychology has a dark history of not
only misunderstanding marginalized
communities
but perpetuating systems of oppression
in the late 19th century
the rise of the eugenics movement used
race psychology to promote social
darwinism and justify racism
while a lot has changed since then the
mental health space still has a long way
to go until it qualifies as
intersectional
even in 2021 we are facing huge
shortages in culturally competent and
diverse clinicians
we need a new system we don't need to
just try
making the current system more
culturally competent or youth competent
we actually need something
different we need our communities to be
less stressful
so we need to think about housing we
have to deal with housing we have to
deal with poverty we have to deal with
job protections
and we need better laws around
discrimination despite barriers
there is progress being made more people
of marginalized identities are entering
psychology
every day talking about emotional
well-being is becoming less and less
taboo
genzirs everywhere are demanding for
change in all spaces
including mental health i think i feel
really
positive about gen z's current push for
advocating for mental health because
they are really
talking openly about mental illness i
think this generation is definitely
doing a lot of work to fight
a lot of guilt and shame and bring a lot
of things out into the open
i am hopeful for the future because i
have seen more and more adults realizing
that it's important to talk about
and even if we still struggle because of
our upbringing i think the
generation to come is going to grow up
with a lot of awareness
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in the next episode we explore the
intersection of race and mental health
more specifically
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you