"When I lost it, they dragged me out": How Care Encounters Empower Marginalized Young Adults' Aspiration and Mental Health Care-Seeking
Jiaying Liu, Yan Zhang
TL;DR
An empirical CSCW study investigates how marginalized young adults in the U.S. navigate mental health care and identifies 'care encounters' as transformative moments that raise aspirations and promote proactive care-seeking. The authors combine in-depth interviews and visual elicitation with Social Ecological Theory to map how resources across technological, interpersonal, community, and societal levels shape access. The study finds pervasive low aspirations linked to lived marginalization, but shows that care encounters—tangible assistance, supportive discourses, and social connections—can catalyze aspirational shifts and new help-seeking behaviors. Design implications emphasize low-tech outreach and identity-aligned, technology-mediated care encounters embedded in users' socio-technical care ecosystems to improve access for vulnerable populations.
Abstract
Mental health care-seeking among marginalized young adults has received limited attention in CSCW research. Through in-depth interviews and visual elicitation methods with 18 diverse U.S. participants, our study reveals how marginalized identities shape mental health care-seeking journeys, often characterized by low aspirations and passive care-seeking influenced by lived experiences of marginalization. However, we found the transformative function of "care encounters" - serendipitous interactions with mental health resources that occur when individuals are not actively seeking support. These encounters serve as critical turning points, catalyzing shifts in aspiration and enabling more proactive care-seeking behaviors. Our analysis identifies both the infrastructural conditions that enable transformative care encounters and the aspiration breakdowns that impede care-seeking processes. This work makes conceptual contributions by supplementing traditional motivation-based care-seeking models with a reconceptualization of "care encounters" that accounts for the infrastructural and serendipitous nature of mental health access. We advance understanding of how marginalized identity uniquely influences care-seeking behaviors while providing actionable design implications for embedding technology-mediated "care encounters" into socio-technical interventions that can better support mental health care access for vulnerable populations.