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For this issue we have chosen to compile a digest of recent research that explores the role of social and cultural factors, such as ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, in the treatment, perception and experience of mental health difficulties. In many ways, child psychotherapists are well placed to identify and examine the unconscious bias that is inevitably activated by the therapeutic encounter. Yet in a profession which continues to lack diversity, conversations about sameness and difference, and about the role of social, cultural and institutional practices in shaping identities, still need to be brought to the fore. Indeed, these challenges were illuminated by the very act of compiling this digest – any attempt to identify what constitutes difference, forces you to acknowledge the myriad assumptions made in defining what is ‘Other’.
In the spirit of broadening our perspective, we have selected research studies from a wide range of disciplines. They include several studies which investigate the impact of cultural factors on patients’ views or experience of depression and suicide (Brijnath & Antoniades, 2018; Wilhelm et al., 2018; Osafo et al., 2017), and which explore the role of unconscious bias and institutionalised prejudice and practices on both therapists, and on mental health in young people from marginalised groups (Grunt-Mejer & Łyś, 2019; Hall, 2017; Rikala, 2019). We have also included recent research into various aspects of non-Western mental health services and clinical work, in China, Africa and India (Pui-Shan Tang et al., 2018; Davids et al., 2019; Choudhary et al., 2019). Two further studies take a radically different perspective on critical incidents in mental health units, and UK education policy, using psychoanalytic and Foucauldian lenses respectively (Moore, 2017; Brown & Carr, 2018). Finally, this digest inverts the usual balance between quantitative and qualitative designs, to give greater weight to qualitative methodologies,