Chapter 1: On Using the Word Culture in Youth Mental Health Services

In this first chapter, I address the issue of the use of the word culture in the context of youth mental health care. I present the findings from the thematic and narrative analysis of discursive material collected with families and youth mental health practitioners. The cultural safety paradigm was used to explore how different operationalizations of the notion of culture may affect families’ and clinicians’ experience of services. The findings reflect a diversity of understandings of the term and its uses, including essentialist views and critical decolonial perspectives. At times, these rhetorical moves serve to “make other” and stereotype or to deflect personal responsibility; however, the culture concept is also used as a tool to mobilize collective representations towards the development of a transformative goal throughout the clinical follow-up. Therefore, I argue that culture can be seen as a mediator of dialogue between clinicians and families, either as a way to engage in an authentic dialogical encounter and install a sense of cultural safety, or as a way to avoid or reject such dialogue. These findings are reported in the following manuscript, and were also presented at the 39^th annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture (SSPC) (Johnson-Lafleur et al., 2018) for an audience of practitioners and researchers, as they provide insight into how the concept of culture is understood and used in the discourses of those who are involved in youth mental health services.