Mental health issues
Examine some of the Mental health issues outlined in the Brown article (such as nihilistic tendencies and suppressed anger etc.) and discuss how these challenges reflect a more broad and important discussion of race and racial injustice. How do these mental health challenges connect to the lecture discussion?
What are your thoughts and ideas about how to address racial oppression and it’s impact on mental health and illness? Be sure that your ideas connect to critical race theory and structural racism.
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Hey everybody, uh, welcome to uh, lecture.
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Sorry I\’m a little scratchy in this one.
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I\’m gonna try to be loud enough for you to hear me.
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Umm, for some reason my voice doesn\’t want to cooperate today, so we\’ll just muscle on through umm.
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So to start, I want to say that, umm, you know, we, we have a sort of a limited pool of resource connected to umm, things like racial discrimination and mental health.
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It isn\’t that we don\’t have some things, but it is a largely understudied field for a variety of reasons.
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But I do want to say that studies of interpersonal racism show that there are very harmful consequences for people\’s life chances.
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So how we act between one another absolutely plays a significant role in the well-being of people of color.
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However, I want to point out that while we need to pay attention to those, we have to keep in mind that the most profound effects of racism actually occur through structural racism and through public policies that shape access to social, economic resources and things like that.
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So these are the systems that produce everyday racism, so they\’re not disconnected.
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And those everyday racisms as well as the larger structural systems can lead to poor mental health over time.
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And the case has like, for example, a description of a patient and their symptoms.
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And then the practitioner is supposed to come up with a diagnosis.
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And so the symptoms are the same in all of the vignettes.
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But when we change the race of the patient, practitioners are more likely to diagnose people of color with harsher, more serious and severe diagnostic categories.
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So a white man might be given a less serious diagnosis, while a man of color would receive a heavy diagnosis like schizophrenia.
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So that helps us make sense of that.
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Four times more likely to be diagnosed.
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So racial stereotypes are used when making a diagnosis.
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Of course, this is true in all of medicine.
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And we learned a little bit about how this kind of bias plays out when we talked about gender.
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So for example, compared with white people with the same symptoms, people of color are more frequently diagnosed with schizophrenia, even with identical symptoms.
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That\’s a one way we look at how racial bias works in in the psychiatric field.
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Just a few more tidbits here.
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In addition to racism being used in psychiatry, we also find that when people of color really need help, there are many barriers to accessing help as well.
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And historical distrust of medical professionals and rightly so.
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Lack of access, poor quality of care, less likely to have medical benefits that might cover care under representation within the psychiatric field.
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So there are few practitioners that are racially and culturally connected to their to their patients.
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For example, this last bullet I have here, the vast majority of mental health providers are white, overwhelmingly so.
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So when help seeking, having somebody that you can relate to racially is really important.
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So looking at the historical and systemic context of the mental health system provides a lot of insight into why these racial disparities exists.
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So racial concerns, including a history of overt racism, and even now all of these are a part of the mental health system.
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So using critical race theory to make sense of how race plays out in our mental health systems now is really important.
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We can also link this knowledge to other racist systems, which is really important, right?
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Especially when we look at things like mass incarceration or how society is set up to systematically deny rights and privileges to communities of color.
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So I hope all of this helps to set up our reading this week, which is a teeny bit challenging.
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It\’s an academic article about critical race theory, but it it breaks down a couple of different diagnostic categories through that lens.
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And I think it\’s really helpful if you can work through the tough stuff there.
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I know you can do it.
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All right, everybody, thanks for hanging in there with me.
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Take care.
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