Racialized immigrant women's pain and damage and their psychiatric disordering and healing in a prairie city Lethbridge, Canada


Shahina Parvin, Brandon University

In this paper, I present findings from in-depth interviews with 13 racialized immigrant women mental health service users in a prairie city, Lethbridge, Canada. The women’s narratives demonstrate that their use of mental health services is linked to their suffering and damage resulting from post-immigration struggles, racialization, gendered norms, domestic and sexual violence, and discrimination in workplaces in Canada. The suffering these women experienced could be seen as a response to their life situations. Yet, without an explanatory framework about those situations, lacking adequate ‘local cultural’, social and economic supports, and finding themselves situated in a society where psychologization and pathologization of suffering are normative, the women instead doubted their cultural ways of living, performativity, identity and ability to achieve a western neoliberal way of living, ‘productive life’ and ‘ideal sane self’. The women went to physicians and/or psychotherapists seeking solutions, drawing upon western psychiatric discourses of suffering and madness. Most of the women in this study were diagnosed with anxiety disorders and/or depression by their physicians, though a few self-diagnosed, drawing upon lay discourses on the medicalization of mental distress, and illustrating their compliance with psychiatric conceptualizations of their problems as individual, biological and pathological. While most of these women sought mental health services due to pain that I suggest is itself a product of neoliberal/settler colonial and heteropatriarchal culture, the psychiatric treatments prescribed by their physicians functioned to further encourage several women to assimilate to these misogynist and imperial structures in order to function ‘better’ as workers, students, mothers, wives, and social beings. Despite differences in their suffering, diagnoses, and use of mental health services, these women worked on themselves to reach a ‘normal life’ and ‘ideal self’ within their discriminatory structural settings. Drawing on these narratives, in this paper, I respond and extend critical, feminist and postcolonial scholarships on madness that claim about the ways in which normative suffering has been constructed as mental disorders, and the ways that psychiatric knowledge, categorization and treatments are gendered and imperialist. I suggest that in order to better address these folx’s suffering, it is important to understand intersectional power relations that played an important role in contributing to these women’s damage.

This paper will be presented at the following session: