Mental health care-seeking among marginalized young adults has received limited attention in CSCW research. Through in-depth interviews and visual elicitation methods with 18 diverse U.S. participants, our study reveals how marginalized identities shape mental health care-seeking journeys, often characterized by low aspirations and passive care-seeking influenced by lived experiences of marginalization. However, we found the transformative function of "care encounters" - serendipitous interactions with mental health resources that occur when individuals are not actively seeking support. These encounters serve as critical turning points, catalyzing shifts in aspiration and enabling more proactive care-seeking behaviors. Our analysis identifies both the infrastructural conditions that enable transformative care encounters and the aspiration breakdowns that impede care-seeking processes. This work makes conceptual contributions by supplementing traditional motivation-based care-seeking models with a reconceptualization of "care encounters" that accounts for the infrastructural and serendipitous nature of mental health access. We advance understanding of how marginalized identity uniquely influences care-seeking behaviors while providing actionable design implications for embedding technology-mediated "care encounters" into socio-technical interventions that can better support mental health care access for vulnerable populations.

翻译：边缘化青年群体的心理健康求助行为在CSCW研究中尚未得到充分关注。通过对18位美国多元背景参与者的深度访谈与视觉启发法研究，我们发现边缘化身份如何形塑心理健康求助历程——这些历程往往表现为低抱负水平，以及受边缘化生活经历影响的被动求助模式。然而，我们发现了"关怀际遇"的转化功能：即个体在非主动寻求支持时与心理健康资源发生的偶然性互动。这些际遇成为关键转折点，催化抱负转变并促成更主动的求助行为。我们的分析既揭示了促成转化性关怀际遇的基础设施条件，也识别出阻碍求助过程的抱负崩溃机制。本研究通过以下方式作出概念贡献：在传统动机导向的求助模型基础上，补充了基于基础设施条件与偶然性特质的"关怀际遇"重构框架。我们深化了对边缘化身份如何独特影响求助行为的理解，同时为将技术媒介化的"关怀际遇"嵌入社会技术干预提供了可操作的设计启示，从而更好地支持弱势群体的心理健康服务可及性。