Beware of Equating Increased Access to Mental Health Services With Health Equity: The Need for Clinical and Epistemic Humility in Psychology

As the coronavirus public health crisis continues to affect countries around the world, it has become increasingly evident that the burdens that are imposed by the pandemic are not shared equally. Those with fewer resources, immigrants, and members of marginalized and racialized groups are at a disproportionate risk of physical harm and emotional distress from coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19; Raifman & Raifman, 2020). However, when responses to discrimination, social disadvantage, and racism are captured as depression (e.g., on survey-based screening instruments), this may result in overmedicalization and overtreatment. Instead of focusing predominantly on increased access to mental health services, humanistic psychology has long recognized the need to address the structural and systemic obstacles that undermine well-being. Indeed, responses to wide-scale human suffering that focus exclusively on intraindividual interventions often keep the status quo intact and do not animate our political imagination (see, e.g., Hodgetts et al., 2020).