Abstract
The last decades have envisioned a shift in the framework that guide different psychological concepts, including those related to wellbeing, mental health, and pathology. Critical Psychology (Pavón-Cuellar, 2019; Teo & Wendt, 2020) has questioned the pertinence and usefulness of traditional psychological categories for approaching contemporary human psyche, interactions and suffering. Underlying this new paradigm of psychology is the idea that human experience lies not exclusively in the depth of individual processes but in the socio-cultural and historical conditions that expand or curtail the conditions of possibility for people (Vygotski, 1981). Migration, and specifically the experience of migrant and racialized women, is one of the fields in which a critical stance on mental issues becomes necessary (Anzaldúa, 1987; Marecek, 2015). When attending to “othered” subjects in social, educational or health services, practitioners informed by the categories of classical psychology might outline a pathological reading of migrant women’s symptoms and psychological needs, using diagnostic categories that might not relate to their cultural assumptions and motives (Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2022). In our paper we will analyze these accounts related to migrant women’s mental health from a critical and psychology perspective, where the tension between the need to recognize the sociocultural origin of mental problems (and pathologies); and the urgency of recognizing resilience, agency, and power in migrant women is at play. Our reflections are informed by community-based research with migrant women in Spain, with a special focus on Latinas as one of the most represented migrant communities in this European country.
Presenters
Beatriz Macías Gómez EsternAssociate Proffessor, Departamento de Antropología Social, Psicología Básica y Salud Pública, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain, Sevilla, Spain
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Migration, Mental Health, Feminism, Migration, Critical Psychology, Agency
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