A new framework in counseling psychology aims to fundamentally shift the field’s focus from individual pathology to the structural forces shaping mental distress. Published in The Counseling Psychologist, psychologist Melanie Wilcox and colleagues introduce a structural competency model that centers anti-Black racism and systemic oppression as primary determinants of mental health. Their approach challenges the limitations of multicultural competency frameworks and calls for a more politically engaged, justice-oriented psychology.
“Our perspective is simultaneously grounded in the deep-seated belief that change must occur at the structural level as well as the reality that most counseling psychologists will be working with individuals and providing individual-level interventions,” the authors write. “As such, our goal is to emphasize that our individual (downstream) work must be grounded in an upstream analysis and understanding while also describing how we can and should work upstream, too.”
This model reorients counseling psychology’s work in assessment, psychotherapy, vocational counseling, prevention, research, and education by shifting the focus from individual symptoms to the broader sociopolitical conditions that shape distress. The authors argue that psychology must move beyond merely recognizing cultural differences to actively dismantling the systems that produce mental suffering.
This work builds upon existing critiques of structural competency, such as those from a Mad Studies perspective, arguing that structural competency fails to question psychiatry’s power dynamics and the faulty concepts underlying medicalized understandings of madness.
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Made me cry.
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From my experience, at 76, I believe that systemic, institutional, and cultural influences have had greater negative impact on my mental health (depression, anxiety, PTSD) than the originating personal events that preceded them. Every life experiences problems and challenges, but it feels further defeating–then, often hopeless–if the resources one has to rely on are bureaucratic, dysfunctional, incompetent, and especially crooked and self-serving (here I emphasize the legal system). My family was torn apart by two conniving lawyers who colluded with impunity in my gratuitous and illegal divorce.
Since the divorce, it has struck me that I no longer encounter a professional (legal, financial, or medical) services and obtain a contractural understanding that is not geared to their advantage. They game our engagement for their own benefit–with no accountability or professional or institutional oversight (both the legal and financial industries) to inhibit them, and then, smuggly retain control.
I have sought comfort in the literature and essays of Wendell Berry, a 20th-century American writer, who elegantly conveys the intimate and communal value of human connection and belonging–long before the cell phone. It is like dipping into an alternate reality, but one older folks can vaguely remember with melancholy.
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