ABSTRACT
Much has been written about decolonizing psychology as a profession, and even more about the necessity of incorporating a gender-fluid framework that is mindful of the intersectional positionality that implicates subjectivities in complex vectors of oppression, invisibility, and marginalization. But how does one actually integrate and apply these complex constructs in a culturally relevant clinical practice? The gap between theory and practice appears to have widened between activists, crisis counsellors, community workers, and other allies, by both action and omission, an issue that this chapter interrogates. Moreover, there are myriad clients who run the risk of becoming re-oppressed by hegemonic practices in mental health care services in Canada: gender-fluid youth with precarious immigration status, who speak languages other than English, and who are either pathologized or rendered invisible by academic discourses and clinical training practices in university settings. Drawing on a decolonizing and gender-fluid framework, this chapter discusses the challenges faced by Indigenous Latino border-youth in accessing anti-oppressive mental health care services in Toronto, Canada. Grounded in the participants’ own “border-narratives” and “gender-fluid existences” (McLaren, 1995, p. 62), the chapterproposes guidelines for a culturally relevant and social justice-based training model for mental health care providers. Rather than adapting hegemonic therapeutic models and practices to a “population at risk,” the chapter proposes that an ongoing critical examination of the sociopolitical underpinnings that ground clinical psychology’s epistemology constitutes a crucial aspect of such training.
