Transforming Mental Health Care to Address Systemic Racism

By exploring the historical roots of racial oppression, the article underscores the lasting consequences of racism on the mental health of marginalized communities.

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A new article published in Review of General Psychology explores how systemic racism has affected the mental health of people of color (POC). Authors Wei-Chin Hwang and Yuhan Kong of Claremont McKenna College argue that beyond acknowledging the social determinants of mental health, the psy-disciplines need to focus on increasing access to care, diversifying the mental health workforce, improving the cultural competence of practitioners, and developing culturally relevant treatment plans for diverse communities.

The authors used an ABC-R method to analyze the problem and produce a list of changes needed in order to start dealing with racism within mental health institutions. The A in ABC-R stands for Antecedents, the B for Behaviors, and C for Consequences. By analyzing systemic racism through that method, they were able to develop their “R” or recommendations. The authors write:

“In order to move beyond the aspirational and performatory anti-racism, a roadmap that outlines specific strategies to counteract systemic racism in mental health care and psychological services is needed.”

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Kevin Gallagher
Dr. Kevin Gallagher is currently an Adjunct Professor of Psychology Point Park University, in Pittsburgh, PA, focusing on Critical Psychology. Over the past decade, he has worked in many different community mental and physical health settings, including four years with the award-winning street medicine program, Operation Safety Net and supervising the Substance Use Disorder Program at Pittsburgh Mercy. Prior to completing his Doctorate in Critical Psychology, he worked with Gateway Health Plan on Clinical Quality Program Development and Management. His academic focus is on rethinking mental health, substance use, and addiction from alternative and burgeoning perspectives, including feminist, critical race, critical posthumanist, post-structuralist, and other cutting edge theories.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Transforming mental health care leaves the socially conditioned brain untouched, leaves the brain of all the mental health workers and the ‘patients’ mutilated by social conditioning which includes socially destructive conceptualizations of identity based on superficial phenotypic physical, cultural and instinctual qualities like skin colour, being a Muslim or a Jew, or the sexual preference of the organism and nature, all of which reflect the normativity of white heterosexual mind, which tries to define us according to these superficial physical differences as if that is who we really are, rather then this complex phenomena of human consciousness which includes the life, the brain, the body, and the world we see. These false conceptual identities, which are merely conceptual and socially-historically constructed by power and domination, produce real world divisions socially and profound psychological confusion that effects the whole social consciousness of humanity, destroying it’s intelligence which is based on seeing things as they are, not defining them according to merely conceptual, conventional socially and historically constructed false identities which divide and destroy.

    It is a problem of our social conditioning that gives rise to all the phenomena of structural and psychological racism and prejudice so reforming mental health care is the same kind of approach as food banks to feed the poor. It leaves the root problem untouched and in that sense enables the root problem to continue, leaves the root problem to fester, to destroy, and it may destroy your whole country. It may mean you loose your children.

    Transforming the brain and consciousness is where it’s at, and a psychosis can help you do that. I am in wonder at the operations of life within me. This is my infinity already. It is infinitely intelligent and it does me. Maybe Mother Nature may marry me. I’ll have to wear my blue hat, blue belt and blue shoes to try and allure her. And she’ll be the electricity doing me. Sure, I’ll be nothing but an empty machine, but I’ll be a love machine, a truth machine, and without choice I’ll be absolutely free. Freedom is choiceless because when there is love there is nothing else one would ever chose, and love is free, and it can carry the body, it can act. We can’t ever find or achieve love, but love is the truth, and if we are religious about the truth then perhaps we’ll come upon that truth which is love.

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  2. Social Darwinism isn’t doing very well because the political and business leaders of the free world are one big muppet show, and all those who think they are prospering constitute one prized pig show, and they all win the prize because they no longer even need to be farmed. They are self-fattening pigs that cultivate a butcher in their heads who calls itself ‘me’ and hides behind this illusory me. The real me is by now enslaved b the social process which masquerades as the butcher called ‘me’. All the rest of us are shattered pretend people who don’t know what they are besides inchoate and dysfunctional thought tormenting a meat and bone machine, and most scramble to construct a sense of self and a sense of reality out of concepts, as if you can create what actually is out of concepts. Instead you create illusions to live in which give you a necessarily illusory sense of security. You have to see and understand what is, not grope around for theories about it, and that includes first and foremost seeing and understanding what you actually are, but most people would burst into flames if they could look at themselves in the clear, polished mirror of a quite, unprejudiced mind. Unless you are one of the totally shattered people of this world. Then probably you will laugh and flower in goodness and light because you will see that what has been lost are your illusions about life, and in that sense, though you’re weak, you only stand to gain from the truth. “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. Blessed are the shattered people.

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