It’s Hard to Search for a Therapist of Color. These Websites Want to Change That

I'm going to give HN the benefit of the doubt of being able to speak sensibly on topics like this since the "Netflix for Black People" thread[0] was filled with nonsense once you got past the few sensible top-level comments. That said...

As a Black ADOS male whose therapist is of Northern Indian descent, my experience is that cultural nuance is important to grasp since culture = behavior, and therefore necessarily informs one's narrative response to various traumas of varying sorts. On the other hand, culture can also be an invisible prison actively preventing your individual self-manifestation as well as how you deal with others' difference. Both of these components vary in proportion to the specific problem at hand of course. However in my case, after demonstrating some discomfort in broaching certain culturally idiosyncratic topics that play part in how I narrativized my particular trauma, I've discovered that it helps to "have to explain things" because it has the effect at times of "hearing yourself speak"; e.g. displacing specific value statements from their monotonous, protective context, allowing you as an individual to more thoroughly hold them up in the light and assess their benefit or constraint for the solution space of the problem at hand. I wager that no one see a therapist who is the same background as themself. This of course necessarily demands a level of training and receptiveness on the part of therapists.

And if I can be allowed to bloviate philosophically, a decent amount of mental issues is our own opaque self-sameness standing in the way, but our selves are built out of responses to multiple, mutually exclusive demands from without, just one of which is the culture we're born into.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087309