Suffering and pain: Racialized immigrant women’s use of mental health services in Lethbridge, Alberta
Abstract
Drawing on in-depth interviews with 13 racialized immigrant women, this research explores experiences of using mental health services in Lethbridge, Alberta. The women’s narratives serve as a thread linking psychiatric, neoliberal, colonial, patriarchal, and other power relations. The treatments focused on the women’s concerns as individualized; the resulting
prescription of antidepressants and psychotherapy required self-colonization to relieve their pain, complicating several women’s experiences of using mental health services. Some women found medical interventions beneficial to their wellbeing, while others resisted psychiatric knowledge at various points because of the embodied suffering they faced, and their reliance on conflicting cultural beliefs and healing systems. By analyzing these women’s experiences, I offer a rethinking of the biomedical conceptualization of mental illness as a natural and universally occurring pathology. Ultimately, I argue that current framings of mental illness obscure the intersectional power relations that played an important role in contributing to these women’s distress.
Notes
Integration timeline:
- 8/13 of the participants were international students. The integration timeline was not otherwise defined.
Key recommendations:
Expand research that focuses on exploring gender issues, colonization, power relations, the pathologizing of misery, and the medicalization and psychiatrization of racialized immigrant women’s bodies and emotions.
Location: Lethbridge, AB
Open access: Yes
Community organizations: n/a
Future research / gaps identified:
- Examine how racialized immigrant men’s experiences may be different or similar to the women’s.
Key findings:
- Colonialism, racism, imperialism, neoliberalism and the patriarchy impact the way racialized immigrant women receive mental health services, how they’re treated in the services, and how effective the services are.
- The mental health services the women received were individualized, biomedically based and from a Western lens.
- The services were effective for some women, but not for others. This varied with factors such as the type of suffering and pain the women faced, and cultural beliefs and healing systems that conflicted with Western mental health models.
Key populations: racialized immigrant women accessing mental health services in Lethbridge, AB
