Date of Award

12-2024

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Clinical Psychology

First Advisor

Tahirah Abdullah

Second Advisor

Alice S. Carter

Third Advisor

Evan Auguste

Abstract

Existing literature suggests Black Americans underutilize the mental health system and experience significant barriers to accessing mental health treatment (Taylor & Kuo, 2019). Research targeted at understanding what factors influence Black Americans decisions to seek mental health treatment have highlighted the role of mental health stigma and linked this construct to reduced utilization of mental health services (Clement et al., 2015). Existing research has also suggested that mental health stigma is “elevated” within Black American samples (Rao et al., 2007), yet few have examined the unique relationship between anti- Blackness and ableism/sanism and how these systems influence Black Americans' reports on mental health stigma. Black Americans navigating the mental health system are often faced with double stigma (Gary, 2005), stigma grounded in both ableism and anti-Blackness, which may function as a deterrent from engaging with the mental health system. Little research exists within clinical psychology examining the mental health system as a system grounded in anti-Blackness and ableism/sanism. Using this framework to understand why Black Americans may not seek care from a system grounded in their oppression, highlights the need for conversations surrounding mental health stigma to center an analysis of the structural forms of oppression that necessitate stigma to maintain hierarchies. Namely, centering an analysis of anti-Blackness, the present and historical systematic devaluation and dehumanization of Black people and culture across social, political, and cultural domains (Sharpe, 2016), ableism, systemic oppression of disabled or labelled disabled people resulting in worth being determined by a person’s ability to comply and produce (Lewis, 2022) , and sanism, systemic oppression normalizing violence (i.e., incarceration, discrimination, exclusion) against people designated as “other” through conceptions of “mental illness diagnoses, history, or even suspicion” (Meerai et al., 2016), as co- existing and interacting systems of oppression establishes important context in attempts to understand the varying ways Black Americans conceptualize mental health stigma and the mental health system itself. The present study aims to use a structural oppression framework of the mental health system, focusing on anti-Blackness and ableism/sanism, to critically interpret data on Black Americans' experiences within the mental health system and reports on different dimensions of mental health stigma.

Comments

Free and open access to this Campus Access Thesis is made available to the UMass Boston community by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. Those not on campus and those without a UMass Boston campus username and password may gain access to this thesis through Interlibrary Loan. If you have a UMass Boston campus username and password and would like to download this work from off-campus, click on the "Off-Campus UMass Boston Users.

Download
Off-Campus UMass Boston Users

Share

COinS