Using Structural Competency to Augment Culturally Responsive Research on Mental Health in Neoliberal Context: Ethnographic Reflections

Culturally responsive methodologies (CRMs) foreground critical engagement, people's voices, and connection with cultural heritage. Similarly, structural competency (SC) advocates for structural humility and cultural safety to address the structural hierarchies and humanize interactions within health care and research settings. In the Global South countries like India, where persistent colonial legacy and neoliberal influences in the post-colonial era continue to dehumanize mental health care and disempower minoritized communities, CRMs are often overlooked. This paper argues that integrating SC could potentially augment the deconstructing and humanizing features of CRM for mental health research in developing countries. Three ethnographic reflections from research on mental health care in India are utilized to highlight (a) the influence of power discourses on the process of developing humanizing dialogic spaces, (b) the potential of research dialogue in building insights about human distress, possibilities, or paradoxes of recovery or healing, and (c) the possibility of creating a more holistic mental health care of the distressed in the neoliberal times. The paper discusses how mental health researchers' structural competencies contribute toward centering the voices (needs, aspirations, and priorities) and reaffirming the dignity of the minoritized communities by enabling documentation of (a) the challenges in developing humanizing research space amidst the dehumanizing and hierarchical care settings and (b) the narratives of distress and healing paradoxes among participants in care settings, influenced by social gender and class hierarchies, shared within these humanizing spaces.