An argument that I see occasionally here and in the field more broadly is that we should be trying to separate politics from our research and try to "be objective." I appreciate where I see that argument as coming from, because I think there are ways to try to be "more objective," and that at the core of these sentiments is a desire to seek the truth. However, I think it's counterproductive to think that it is possible for us to fully remove our political ideologies or subjectivities from our work, and obscures the fact that we are humans that are therefore inherently riddled with biases. We can't remove politics from our research. What we decide to research and how we research it is already inherently a political question. What kinds of research is allowed/encouraged, who/what gets funded, who pursues and gets accepted into academia - these are all at least partly political questions.
To bring some clarity to my argument, I define ideologies as "systems of socially shared ideas, beliefs, and values used to understand, justify, or challenge a particular political, economic, or social order." This is a broad definition that can be hard to apply, but I think it's a worthwhile one that is important to tease apart. Not everything is inherently a political question; but conversely, elements of political ideology tend to influence just about everything we do and think about. For example, we all need to eat and generally maintain some degree of domestic order - what and how we do that is a deeply political question. The food we have access to is shaped by a complex web of regional and economic factors. But even getting to the very basic individual acts of cooking or cleaning, it can get muddy. Cooking and cleaning the dishes is in itself not necessarily an inherently political act; however, when that task gets relegated to specific groups of people - then we are back in the realm of politics. When certain groups of people (historically, women of the household or domestic workers primarily made up of immigrants, women of color, women of lower SES, etc.) are impacted by those tasks or questions at different rates, we are looking at at least a partially political issue.
Every realm of mental health research is impacted and shaped by our political world, and how we're approaching those problems is shaped by our political ideologies. I don't see this as a bad thing - I see it as an inescapable fact that we need to incorporate into our thinking. I think it is possible and good to strive toward more validity and to figure out how to better account for how our perspectives influence our research, but I think that necessitates acknowledging our political ideologies and perspectives, rather than trying to divorce them entirely from our work.
