Governing Through Competency: Race, Pathologization, and the Limits of Mental Health Outreach

• Main Author: Tam, Louise
• Other Authors: Razack, Sherene
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: construction of mental disorder; racial governmentality; immigrant women; minority youth; cultural competency; cross-cultural mental health; Brief Symptom Inventory; Attitudes Towards Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale; community needs assessment; Postcolonial Studies; institutional ethnography; Disability Studies; race; deviance; depression; self-esteem; madness; oppression as disease; anti-racism; health equity; antipsychiatry; feminist; Foucauldian genealogy; contrapuntal reading; psychiatric survivors; multicultural practice; technologies of the self; social organization of mental health; 0631; 0453; 0703; 0339; 0385
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/33677

This thesis examines how cultural competency operates as a regime of governmentality. Inspired by Foucauldian genealogy, institutional ethnography, and Said’s concept of contrapuntality, this thesis problematizes the seamless production of racialized bodies in relation to mental disorder. I begin by elaborating a theoretical framework for interpreting race and madness as mutually constructed ordering practices. I then analyze what cultural competence produces and sustains in a position paper published by the Ontario Federation of Community Mental Health and Addiction Programs. I argue the Federation dismisses ongoing institutional violence—suggesting it is simply the perception, as opposed to the everyday reality, of discrimination that causes problems such as low educational attainment among youth of colour. To further support this claim, I deconstruct narratives of low self-esteem, maladaptive coping, depression, and denial of mental illness in the community needs assessments of two of the Federation’s member organizations: Hong Fook and Across Boundaries.