Beyond the Color Bar: Sharing Narratives in Order to Promote a Clearer Understanding of Mental Health Issues Across Cultural and Racial Boundaries

This chapter describes through the narratives of those involved the contrasting experiences of one black and three white men who have worked together over a number of years on a series of academic and training projects. The shared aim of the group is to reach better understanding of each other’s perspectives (to get ‘beyond the colour bar’) thus gaining insights that could contribute to reducing the black-white inequalities that continue within mental health service provision. The extent of the differences between group members revealed by their respective narratives might suggest that they have failed in their shared aim. Held together however as they are by the premise of mutual respect underpinning values-based practice, the differences between them point instead to the importance of ‘whiteness’ as an implicit cultural frame driving racial inequalities in mental health. Challenging this frame and thus delivering more equal treatment will involve overcoming the challenge of pluralism at the heart of values-based practice.