Eliminating Race Based Mental Health Disparities

In this edited volume, three leading experts in race, mental health, and contextual behavior science address the urgent problem of racial inequities and biases, whichoften prevent people of color from seeking mental health services--leading to poor outcomes if and when they do receive treatment. This critical and timely guide provides clinicians and educators with evidence-based recommendations for addressing inequities at multiple levels, as well as best practices for compassionately and effectively helping clients across a range of cultural groups and settings.

Eliminating Race-Based Mental Health Disparities offers concrete guidelines and evidence-based best practices for addressing racial inequities and biases in clinical care. Perhaps there is no subject more challenging than the intricacies of race and racism in American culture. More and more, it has become clear that simply teaching facts about cultural differences between racial and ethnic groups is not adequate to achieve cultural competence in clinical care. One must also consider less “visible” constructs—including implicit bias, stereotypes, white privilege, intersectionality, and microaggressions—as potent drivers of behaviors and attitudes. In this edited volume, three leading experts in race, mental health, and contextual behavior science explore the urgent problem of racial inequities and biases, which often prevent people of color from seeking mental health services—leading to poor outcomes if and when they do receive treatment. In this much-needed resource, you’ll find evidence-based recommendations for addressing problems at multiple levels, and best practices for compassionately and effectively helping clients across a range of cultural groups and settings. As more and more people gain access to services that have historically been unavailable to them, guidelines for cultural competence in clinical care are needed. Eliminating Race-Based Mental Health Disparities offers a comprehensive road map to help you address racial health disparities and improve treatment outcomes in your practice.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Offers an innovative plan to eliminate inequalities in American health care and save the lives they endanger Over 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities: the unfair, unjust, and avoidable differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites. Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system—and in Just Medicine Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients. Implicit bias is the single most important determinant of health and health care disparities. Because we have missed this fact, the money we spend on training providers to become culturally competent, expanding wellness education programs and community health centers, and even expanding access to health insurance will have only a modest effect on reducing health disparities. We will continue to utterly fail in the effort to eradicate health disparities unless we enact strong, evidence-based legal remedies that accurately address implicit and unintentional forms of discrimination, to replace the weak, tepid, and largely irrelevant legal remedies currently available. Our continued failure to fashion an effective response that purges the effects of implicit bias from American health care, Matthew argues, is unjust and morally untenable. In this book, she unites medical, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology research on implicit bias and health disparities with her own expertise in civil rights and constitutional law. In a time when the health of the entire nation is at risk, it is essential to confront the issues keeping the health care system from providing equal treatment to all.

An essential text for courses in public health, health policy, and sociology, this compelling book is a vital teaching tool and a comprehensive reference for social science and medical professionals.

As a nation, we have only begun to come to terms with the reality and impact of mental illnesses on the health and well being of the American people. This groundbreaking publication makes clear that the tragic and devastating effects of mental illnesses touch people of all ages, colors, and cultures. And though Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General informed us that there are effective treatments available for most disorders, Americans do not share equally in the best that science has to offer. Through the process of conducting his comprehensive scientific review for this Supplement, and with recognition that mental illnesses are real, disabling conditions affecting all populations regardless of race or ethnicity, the Surgeon General has determined that disparities in mental health services exist for racial and ethnic minorities, and thus, mental illnesses exact a greater toll on their overall health and productivity.Diversity is inherent to the American way of life, and so is equal opportunity. Ensuring that all Americans have equal access to high quality health care, including mental health care, is a primary goal of the Department of Health and Human Services. By identifying the many barriers to quality care faced by racial and ethnic minorities, this Supplement provides an important road map for Federal, State, and local leaders to follow in eliminating disparities in the availability, accessibility, and utilization of mental health services.An exemplary feature of this Supplement is its consideration of the relevance of history and culture to our understanding of mental health, mental illness, and disparities in services. In particular, the national prevention agenda can be informed by understanding how the strengths of different groups' cultural and historical experiences might be drawn upon to help prevent the emergence of mental health problems or reduce the effects of mental illness when it strikes. This Supplement takes a promising first step in this direction.One of the profound responsibilities of any government is to provide for its most vulnerable citizens. It is now incumbent upon the public health community to set in motion a plan for eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in mental health. To achieve this goal, we must first better understand the roles of culture, race, and ethnicity, and overcome obstacles that would keep anyone with mental health problems from seeking or receiving effective treatment. We must also endeavor to reduce variability in diagnostic and treatment procedures by encouraging the consistent use of evidence-based, state-of-the-art medications and psychotherapies throughout the mental health system. At the same time, research must continue to aid clinicians in understanding how to appropriately tailor interventions to the needs of the individual based on factors such as age, gender, race, culture, or ethnicity.

Health disparities exist between races in America. These inequalities are cataloged in numerous studies, reports, conferences, articles, seminars, and keynote speeches. Various studies include reports on income, health insurance, cultural differences between patients and their physicians, language barriers, and biological “racial” differences in the discourse of health disparities. On Race and Medicine: Insider Perspectives is a collection of enlightening personal essays written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, physicians, and medical school deans. They invite readers to evaluate disparities differently when considering race in American healthcare. They address the very real, everyday circumstances of healthcare differences where race is concerned, and shine light on the realities of race itself, inequalities in healthcare, and on the very way these American complexities can be discussed and considered. This is not another chronicle of studies cataloging differences in health care based on race. The essays are narrated from practical and personal stances examining disparate health between the races. Decreasing inequalities in health for racial minorities, who are sicker in so many areas—diabetes, heart disease, stage of cancer, etc.—is financially good for everyone. But understanding health inequalities in race is of even greater human importance. How race intersects with medicine is striking given the existence of racial issues throughout the rest of American history. These authors attempt to explain and explore the truth about health disparities, which is necessary before we can turn our national attention toward eliminating differences in health based on race.