Centering Black Voices : How Narratives Can Help Reframe Mental Health Treatment for Montreal’s Afro-Caribbean Community

Centering Black voices: How narratives can help reframe mental health treatment for Montreal’s Afro-Caribbean community

Background and purpose: Black community members continue to be overrepresented within mandatory mental health services and underrepresented in voluntary services, despite research establishing long ago that services are not culturally relevant for Afro descendants. This discrepancy between psychological distress and service seeking behavior raises concerns about the potential impact of racial stereotypes and ethnocentric practices perpetuating discriminatory interventions within social services, particularly pertaining to mental health treatment.

The objective of this research is to center the diverse experiences of mental illness and treatment within Black communities, by giving them the opportunity to speak for themselves. The narratives, co-created with each participant, provide a better understanding of how social representations of mental illness influence help-seeking behavior and treatment perspectives within Black communities. The voices stemming directly from the community, provide further support to raise awareness and decrease stigma from within Black communities, as well as allowing community members to advocate and develop services more appropriate to its specific needs.

Methods: This study used eight semi-structured interviews to elicit life story narratives, allowing participants to share their understanding of their illness, and the help-seeking and treatment process. Participants are adults (age 25 to 64) who identified as Afro-Caribbean, diagnosed with a mental illness, and provided with a treatment plan. 50% of the sample are first-generation immigrants.

The narrative approach provides the space needed for Afro-Caribbean descendants to contextualize their illness and voice their concerns in their own words and without judgment, which influences the treatment process and further recovery. The space to center the lived experiences of Black people is too often denied to this population, especially when it does not comply with the dominant narrative.

Findings: The intersection of race and illness specifically influences the experience of psychological distress and subsequent recovery, within the Afro-Caribbean community, as the strengths and resources available within Black communities are undervalued or ignored. These findings highlight the need to work within the community, not only to decrease the stigma surrounding this social issue, but to also improve prevention and interventions in situations of psychological distress. Additionally, our research shows that, regardless of generational differences, social representations of mental illness include a combination of biomedical, traditional, and spiritual/religious perspectives that influence participants’ help-seeking behaviors and what they believe to be pertinent to their recovery.

Conclusions and implications: These findings highlight the discrepancies between a western model of psychological distress, focused solely on a biomedical perspective to treatment and an Afro-Caribbean perspective that focuses on t a holistic approach to understanding psychological distress and its treatment. In fact, the ethnocentrism that surrounds the normative framework of mental health service offerings and treatment guidelines, perpetuates a racial gap in access to services. It is imperative for mental health agencies to center the voices and perspectives of the communities that they claim to want to help by authentically uplifting and including frameworks and institutions that are important to Black community members.