Beyond the “Child Mental Health Crisis” and COVID-19: An Intersectional, Transgenerational Analysis of Racism and Oppression

This article engages with issues arising from a 2021–2022 project consulting with Pakistani heritage-identifying adults in an economically deprived British town, Rochdale, to document and communicate their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. While our original research brief reflected local and national government concerns around the “child mental health crisis,” matters affecting educational practices and other support provisions for children emerged that were neither specifically educational nor child-focused. Our participant accounts foregrounded experiences of transgenerational, historical, racialised, and intersectional gendered oppression (re)kindled by the government responses to the pandemic. We mobilise two research analytic to interpret consultation extracts, “child as method” and “border as method.” We caution that a child-focused approach works to abstract and depoliticise wider historical and socioeconomic inequalities alongside racism and transgenerational injustice whilst psychologising issues of “mental health.” Then, we question both what is topicalised and excluded by “child mental health,” without minimising wider traumatogenic contexts of distress affecting both children and adults arising from racialised, transgenerational, gendered oppression. Engaging Fanon's psycho-political understandings with feminist analyses, we conclude by arguing how claims to, and for, “childhood” support provision and “mental health” sit within wider axes of oppressive power relations.