Intersectionality and discriminatory practices within mental health care

Through this article collection, we invite readers to get acquainted with intersectionality as a tool to help us challenge mental health care practices that reproduce social injustice. Social injustice describes how the set-up of societies, including social processes and institutions, can disproportionally disadvantage members of marginalized social groups, thereby unjustly constraining their possibilities for flourishing [ 1 ]. The stigmatizing effects of mental health diagnoses, which still, in many contexts, shape a person’s conditions of flourishing, are well known [ 2 ]. Yet it is less considered that when a person receives a mental health diagnosis, that person already occupies a social position characterized by various markers of identity that constrain and enable their possibilities [ 3 ]. We intuitively see that the situation of a White high school teacher with depression differs from the situation of a trans woman of color with anxiety. Yet what difference does this difference make? And how can we approach such differences within mental health care from a social justice perspective?