**1. Introduction**

As people struggle with the social instabilities and stress-filled emotions necessitated by COVID-19, the pandemic has produced a significant need for mental health care [1]. Racism and the pandemic are a double burden of stress for racialised groups [2]. On the one hand, racism-induced distress and fear can increase the risk of negative mental health outcomes for those affected by COVID-19 [3]. Distress and fear over COVID-19, on the other hand, can additionally increase the risk of negative mental health outcomes for persons who are affected by racism [4]. The murder of George Floyd at the start of the pandemic heightened public awareness of racialised people's experiences with racism [5]. Meanwhile, George Floyd's murder also heightened racialised people's anxiety and fear of racism. Moreover, keep in

mind that George Floyd was only the catalyst. Police brutality, as one format of structural racism, has been and continues to be a problem. Several social campaigns, including #SayHisName, #SayHerName, and #SayTheirNames, have attempted to raise awareness of the issue's scope [6, 7].

In Germany, the pandemic began at a time when there was an exceptional public interest in the problem of racism, following the murders at the Halle synagogue and the Hanau shisha bars, in which Jewish and Muslim persons were the victims of violent anti-Semitic and racist attacks [8]. Vicarious racism is a term used to describe when people are indirectly exposed to violently racist incidents, such as in the media [9]. Although vicarious racism does not pose a direct threat, evidence suggests that the anguish and terror induced by it are associated with unfavourable mental health outcomes [10, 11]. Throughout the pandemic, racism has been a societal stressor. Not to mention that the pandemic is associated with increased instances of interpersonal racism for many racialised groups, particularly against people of Asian descent [12]. For people from India, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil, the pandemic has also become linked to a higher risk of interpersonal discrimination because of unintended public stigma caused by the identification of various variations. In an attempt to eliminate discrimination, the World Health Organisation has altered the naming system to remove associations with the regions where they originated and has replaced them with Greek alphabet letters. The Indian variant (B.1.617.2) is now called Delta. The UK variant (B1.1.7) is now called Alpha. The South African variant (B.1.351) is now called Beta. And the Brazilian variant (P.1) is now called Gamma [13].

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light several issues relating to structural racism and mental health, including the impact of pre-existing racisminduced disparities in rates of diagnosable mental illness as well as shortages in mental health care allocations [14]. These disparities are becoming exacerbated by infection containment strategies [15]. The fact that the pandemic is amplifying racism-induced disparities, rather than causing them in and of itself, emphasises the importance of reflecting upon how structural racism in society and in the mental health system perpetuates disparities**.** We recommend implementing decolonial intercultural competency into culture and migration mental health and prioritising the provision of emotional safety in services focused on (a) the ability to recognise social identities, socio-cultural formations, and essential humanity, as well as the ability to engage a decolonial approach when it comes to over-pathologising/under-pathologising variances in racism-induced difficulties, (b) the ability to strengthen the capacity of Black people and People of Colour to achieve the greatest possible gains at the lowest possible cost in terms of social efficacy and quality of life and well-being, and (c) the ability to respect each human being's intrinsic human dignity as a person, including his or her social and cultural history, regardless of developmental stage, existential state, or other extrinsic circumstances.

#### **2. The racism-induced reactive negative emotionality cycle**

The mental health of Black people and People of Colour is negatively impacted by a double exposure to vicarious racism and interpersonal racism, which is occurring in the context of ongoing societal pandemic stress and instability. Racism is a set of harmful events that occur due to racist attackers ascribing derogatory views to racialised aspects of the victims' personhood, such as their name and skin colour [16]. Racism sends the message to victims that their racialised characteristics prevent them from fully participating in the microcosm. A microcosm is a group

#### *Perspective Chapter: Cultivating Environments of Belonging in Psychiatry, Clinical Psychology… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99925*

of people, an area, or a situation. Racism on the streets sends the message that they and their racialised attributes do not belong in the district or city, but racism at schools or universities sends the message that they and their racialised attributes do not belong in the classroom, for example. Sociologists have defined the emotionality of social and political belonging as an overarching positive feeling of affinity to the microcosm [17]. Similarly, and in contrast, the sense of not belonging is the conclusion of a slew of destructive emotions triggered by racism.

These reactive emotions can evolve into proactive emotions in the future. However, victims may become engulfed in a racism-induced reactive negative emotionality cycle in the first instance (see **Figure 1**). The psychological strains experienced by people within various intersecting systems of oppression and inequity increase their susceptibility to poor mental health outcomes that accumulate over time, according to social stress process models like the Immigrant Risk Model [18] and the Minority Stress Model [19]. Racism is one of the most pressing societal phenomena for mental health practitioners to increase knowledge about in the context of migration and culture. Racialised people's vulnerabilities to various injustices in their daily lives and the unresolved anger and bitter disappointment surrounding these racist experiences may act as precipitating factors for emotional alienation and further perpetuating factors for poor mental health [1, 20]. Through an intersectionality lens, understanding the emotional impact of racism allows us to realise the complexity of dynamic lived experiences under changing situations. For example, in mental health counselling, it is not about who has more or less racism in their lived experiences, but rather how racism is experienced qualitatively due to the junction of other ascribed social identities and the differential allocation of/access to resources that may make racism easier to handle [21].

#### **Figure 1.** *The racism-induced reactive negative emotionality cycle.*

In recent years, the usefulness of intercultural competency in overcoming racism in patient-professional communication and treatment provision has received some attention in the transcultural mental health discourse [22]. The phrase 'intercultural competency' is sometimes used interchangeably in the literature with terms like 'multicultural competency', 'cross-cultural competency' and 'transcultural competency'. In so doing, interculturalists may draw upon philosophical tenets of interculturalism to provide a standard that aims to concretely centre the intrinsic human dignity of each human being as a complete person, including his or her background, regardless of developmental stage, existential condition, or other extrinsic considerations in patientprofessional interactions [23]. Bhiku Parekh [24] describes interculturalism as,

*"[the]cultural embeddedness of human beings, the inescapability and desirability of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue, and the internal plurality of each culture...to illuminate the insights and expose the limitations of others and create...a vital in-between space, a kind of immanent transcendentalism, from which to arrive at a less culture-bound vision of human life and a radically critical perspective".*

*(p 338–339).*

Interculturalists have developed a plethora of best-practice guidelines for practical intercultural competency (e.g., [25–32]). Decolonial interculturalists conceptualise intercultural competence as two broad steps, notwithstanding the intricacy of many of these frameworks. On a structural level, the first step is to recognise the underlying fact of ethnocentrism in terms of the values and patterns of behaviour embedded throughout the depth and breadth of Western mental health science, including institutionalised practices and governance [33]. The second is a greater engagement with Black Lives Matter's 'embodied feeling' to integrate non-Western worldviews, thereby facilitating the successful elimination of structural racism throughout Western mental health science [34].
