Psychiatrists Outline Strategies to Achieve Antiracism in Medicine

From the devastating effects of COVID-19 on the Black community to the killings of Black Americans by police, 2020 is likely to be remembered in part for the stark reminder that racism and racist policies kill people. “Physicians’ responsibilities in addressing racism and racial violence toward Black Americans range from examining and taking steps to counter our own implicit and explicit biases to addressing policies and procedures that reproduce inequities within mental health delivery systems,” wrote psyc hiatrists Barbara Robles-Ramamurthy, M.D., Angela A. Coombs, M.D., Walter Wilson, M.D., and Sarah Y. Vinson, M.D., in acommentary in theJournal of the American Academy of Child& Adolescent Psychiatry.Drawing from literature and their personal experience, the authors offered the following recommendations for the field of medicine, as it relates to the following roles:Educators:“[I]t is incumbent upon us to change how we teach about race,” they wrote. This includes considering structural competence (the ways in which social structures affect patients’ health and well-being) as a core competency, as well as providing training about “how structural racism fuels inequ ities in child mental health.”Clinicians:Clinicians should educate themselves about the over- and underdiagnosis of psychiatric disorders in Black youth and conduct chart reviews to see if there are inequities in diagnostic patterns within their practices. It is also important for clinicia...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: antiracism clinicians educators Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry medical administrators mental health overdiagnosis underdiagnosis Source Type: research