Diversity and Culturally Responsive Mental Health Practice

Abstract

There is an increasing recognition within the mental health system of the need to design and develop services that are more inclusive of and responsive to all voices and perspectives. Developing culturally inclusive mental health practice and systems requires us to move beyond traditional cultural competence frameworks that focus on knowledge acquisition to the idea of cultural humility. The emphasis within the cultural humility discourse is on an inward journey of reflection in order to understand how dominant mainstream narratives of heteronormativity, cisnormativity and ethnocentric models of mental distress and illness frame perceptions and actions and contribute to the perpetuation of power differentials within the therapeutic relationship and the wider mental health system. Using Fisher-Borne (2015) ideas of lifelong learning and critical reflection, institutional and individual accountability, and mitigating power imbalances, this chapter focuses on how the APMHN can, through their own practice, embrace intersectional and pluralistic understandings of, and approaches to, mental health as well as championing the systemic changes required to promote cultural humility across the mental health system.