From Treatment to Healing: Envisioning a Decolonial Digital Mental Health

The feld of digital mental health is making strides in the application of technology to broaden access to care. We critically examine how these technology-mediated forms of care might amplify historical injustices, and erase minoritized experiences and expressions of mental distress and illness. We draw on decolonial thought and critiques of identity-based algorithmic bias to analyze the underlying power relations impacting digital mental health technologies today, and envision new pathways towards a decolonial digital mental health. We argue that a decolonial digital mental health is one that centers lived experience over rigid classifcation, is conscious of structural factors that infuence mental wellbeing, and is fundamentally designed to deter the creation of power diferentials that prevent people from having agency over their care. Stemming from this vision, we make recommendations for how researchers and designers can support more equitable futures for people experiencing mental distress and illness.

• Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI).