"When I lost it, they dragged me out": How Care Encounters Empower Marginalized Young Adults' Mental Health Care-Seeking

2025-02-16

AI Summary

This study investigates the behavioral shift—from passive to active help-seeking—among youth with marginalized identities in mental health contexts. Using in-depth interviews and visual elicitation methods, and grounded in a CSCW socio-technical analytical framework, we introduce and systematically articulate the novel concept of *serendipitous care encounters*: unplanned, context-embedded care interventions. We identify three interlocking mechanisms through which such encounters catalyze behavioral change: embodied assistance, supportive discourse, and social connection—and delineate the infrastructural conditions enabling them. Findings demonstrate that serendipitous care encounters serve as pivotal turning points in mental health care journeys. The study provides empirical grounding and actionable design principles for developing scalable, low-threshold, contextually adaptive mental health intervention systems—particularly those prioritizing equity, accessibility, and situated support for structurally vulnerable populations.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

CSCW research has long explored ways to enhance the well-being of marginalized populations. This study examines how young adults with diverse marginalized identities navigate their mental health care-seeking journeys through in-depth interviews and visual elicitation methods. Our research with 18 U.S. participants reveals predominantly extit{passive} behavioral patterns shaped by participants' lived experiences of marginalization. A key finding centers on extit{"care encounters"} - serendipitous interactions with mental health resources that occur when individuals are not actively seeking support. These encounters emerged as critical turning points, catalyzing shifts from passive to proactive care-seeking behaviors. The transformative impact of these encounters operated through three primary mechanisms: tangible assistance, supportive discourse, and social connection building. Our analysis illuminates the infrastructural conditions that enable such transformative encounters and their effectiveness in connecting marginalized young adults with mental health care. This research advances our understanding of how marginalization influences care-seeking behaviors while providing concrete design implications for socio-technical interventions. Our findings suggest strategies for intentionally engineering care encounters that can help overcome passive behavioral patterns and strengthen marginalized young adults' engagement with mental health resources.

Problem

• Enhancing mental health care-seeking in marginalized young adults
• Transforming passive to proactive care-seeking behaviors
• Designing socio-technical interventions for care encounters

Innovation

• In-depth interviews
• Visual elicitation methods
• Engineering care encounters