Health inequities and social determinants of health in refugee and immigrant communities.
This article evaluates and elucidates the intersections across social and economic determinants of health and social structures that maintain current inequities and structural violence with a focus on the impact on imMigrants (immigrants and migrants), refugees, and those who remain invisible (e.g., people without immigration status who reside in the United States) from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities. Psychology has a history of treating individuals and families without adequately considering how trauma is cyclically and generationally maintained by structural violence, inequitable resources, and access...
Source: American Psychologist - April 3, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Racism exposure and trauma accumulation perpetuate pain inequities—advocating for change (RESTORATIVE): A conceptual model.
American Psychologist, Vol 78(2), Feb-Mar 2023, 143-159; doi:10.1037/amp0001042Experiences of racism occur across a continuum from denial of services to more subtle forms of discrimination and exact a significant toll. These multilevel systems of oppression accumulate as chronic stressors that cause psychological injury conceptualized as racism-based traumatic stress (RBTS). RBTS has overlapping symptoms with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with the added burden that threats are constantly present. Chronic pain is a public health crisis that is exacerbated by the intersection of racism and health inequities. However, ...
Source: American Psychologist - April 3, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Practical applications of implementing integrated mental health practices with primary care providers.
This article describes six mental health-related health care practice transformation projects implemented across rural health care settings, including Federally Qualified Health Centers and academic medical centers. The topics included (a) depression in pregnant and postpartum mothers; (b) adverse childhood experiences screening; (c) depression and chronic disease outcomes, especially diabetes; (d) the use of automated enhancements in patients’ electronic medical records for management of clinical depression; (e) improving health outcomes and medication adherence of patients with opioid use disorder; and (f) the (in)adeq...
Source: American Psychologist - April 3, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Mental health care equity and access: A group therapy solution.
This article will argue that inefficient supply of services is created by mental health providers being incentivized toward individual therapy. Group therapy offers a solution because it is a “triple E treatment”—efficient, effective, and equivalent to individual therapy in terms of outcomes (Burlingame & Strauss, 2021). Group interventions also address systemic racism and the needs of minorities who have been marginalized and cope with minority stress. This article will utilize a labor and financial impact analysis to demonstrate how increasing group therapy by 10% nationally, particularly in private practice and pr...
Source: American Psychologist - April 3, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Psychologists as leaders in equitable science: Applications of antiracism and community participatory strategies in a pediatric behavioral medicine clinical trial.
American Psychologist, Vol 78(2), Feb-Mar 2023, 107-118; doi:10.1037/amp0001086Psychologists have an ethical responsibility to advance health equity and can play a significant role in improving health care experiences for families racialized as Black, including those with sickle cell disease (SCD), a group of genetic blood disorders primarily affecting communities of color. Parents of children with SCD report experiences of stigma and discrimination due to racism in the health care system. The current commentary describes the application of antiracism and participatory strategies to the research design, implementation, and...
Source: American Psychologist - April 3, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Child health equity and primary care.
This article delineates how the integration of psychologists within the P-PCMH can advance child health equity. This discussion emphasizes roles (i.e., clinician, consultant, trainer, administrator, researcher, and advocate) that psychologists can undertake with explicit intentionality toward promoting equity. These roles consider structural and ecological drivers of inequities and emphasize interprofessional collaboration within and across child-serving systems of care using community-partnered shared decision-making approaches. Owing to the multiple intersecting drivers implicated in health inequities—ecological (e.g.,...
Source: American Psychologist - April 3, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Optimizing ATTAIN implementation in a federally qualified health center guided by the FRAME-IS.
American Psychologist, Vol 78(2), Feb-Mar 2023, 82-92; doi:10.1037/amp0001077Implementation strategies are methods or techniques used to adopt, implement, and sustain evidence-based practices (EBPs). Implementation strategies are dynamic and may require adaptation to fit implementation contexts, especially in low-resource settings, which are most likely to serve racially and ethnically diverse patients. The framework for reporting adaptations and modifications to evidence-based implementation strategies (FRAME-IS) was used to document adaptations to implementation strategies to inform an optimization pilot of Access to Tai...
Source: American Psychologist - April 3, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
How psychologists can help achieve equity in health care—advancing innovative partnerships and models of care delivery: Introduction to the special issue.
American Psychologist, Vol 78(2), Feb-Mar 2023, 73-81; doi:10.1037/amp0001153For as long as the United States has been a country, the distribution of good health has been unequal. In this special issue, we consider what psychology can do to understand and ameliorate these inequalities. The introduction sets the context for why psychologists are well positioned, well trained, and needed to champion health equity via innovative partnerships and models of care delivery. A guide is provided for engaging and maintaining a health equity lens in advocacy, research, education/training, and practice efforts for psychologists, and r...
Source: American Psychologist - April 3, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Guidelines for assessment and intervention with persons with disabilities: An executive summary.
This article provides an executive summary of the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) revised Guidelines for Assessment and Intervention With Persons With Disabilities. The revision was requested by the Committee on Disability Issues in Psychology and was approved by the APA Council of Representatives in February 2022. The task force updated and expanded the guidelines’ empirical bases; squarely situated the guidelines in a changing sociocultural landscape (reflected in discussions of disability models, biases and barriers, language use, intersectionality, and respectful and fair assessment and intervention)...
Source: American Psychologist - March 16, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The spillover effects of classmates’ police intrusion on adolescents’ school-based defiant behaviors: The mediating role of institutional trust.
American Psychologist, Vol 78(8), Nov 2023, 941-954; doi:10.1037/amp0001148Peers’ negative police encounters may have collateral consequences and shape adolescents’ relationship with authority figures, including those in the school context. Due to the expansion of law enforcement in schools (e.g., school resource officers) and nearby neighborhoods, schools include spaces where adolescents witness or learn about their peers’ intrusive encounters (e.g., stop-and-frisks) with the police. When peers experience intrusive police encounters, adolescents may feel like their freedoms are infringed upon by law enforcement and ...
Source: American Psychologist - March 13, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Culturally responsive assessment of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in youth of color.
This article attempts to address this gap in the literature by examining the cultural relevancy of currently widely used suicide risk assessment instruments, research on suicide risk factors, and approaches to risk assessment for youth from communities of color. It also notes that researchers and clinicians should consider other, nontraditional but important factors in suicide risk assessment, including stigma, acculturation, and racial socialization, as well as environmental factors like health care infrastructure and exposure to racism and community violence. The article concludes with recommendations for factors that sh...
Source: American Psychologist - March 13, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Mental health and disadvantaged youth: Empowering parents as interventionists through technology.
American Psychologist, Vol 78(8), Nov 2023, 927-940; doi:10.1037/amp0001156Youth mental health is in a crisis as prevalence rates for youth psychopathology continue to rise. With global increases in youth mental health problems, along with the havoc wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health disparities continue to widen as youth from disadvantaged backgrounds (e.g., ethnic/racial minority, low socioeconomic, rural, gender and sexual minorities) are disparately impacted. Parents occupy a critical position in their children’s lives in terms of influence, proximity, and responsibility for providing their children with...
Source: American Psychologist - March 9, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Intergroup contact is reliably associated with reduced prejudice, even in the face of group threat and discrimination.
American Psychologist, Vol 78(6), Sep 2023, 761-774; doi:10.1037/amp0001144Intergroup contact provides a reliable means of reducing prejudice. Yet, critics suggested that its efficacy is undermined, even eliminated, under certain conditions. Specifically, contact may be ineffective in the face of threat, especially to (historically) advantaged groups, and discrimination, experienced especially by (historically) disadvantaged groups. We considered perceived intergroup threat and perceived discrimination as potential moderators of the effect of contact on prejudice. Two meta-analyses of correlational data from 34 studies (to...
Source: American Psychologist - March 9, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Ferdinand Taylor Jones (1932–2022).
American Psychologist, Vol 78(5), Jul-Aug 2023, 724; doi:10.1037/amp0001154Memorializes Ferdinand Taylor Jones (1932–2022). Jones' career as a clinical psychologist was characterized by an unwavering commitment to social justice, multicultural training, and college mental health. He was professor of psychology emeritus and lecturer emeritus in the School of Medicine at Brown University. Jones was the first director of Brown’s Department of Psychological Services when it was created in 1980. In the Warren Alpert School of Medicine, he established seminars on minority issues for psychology interns and postdoctoral fellow...
Source: American Psychologist - March 9, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Looking beyond the obvious.
American Psychologist, Vol 78(5), Jul-Aug 2023, 667-677; doi:10.1037/amp0001152A hallmark of human cognition is the capacity to think about observable experience in ways that are nonobvious—from scientific concepts (genes, molecules) to everyday understandings (germs, soul). Where does this capacity come from, and how does it develop? I propose that, contrary to what is classically assumed, young children often extend beyond the tangible “here-and-now” to think about hidden, invisible, abstract, or nonpresent entities. I review examples from three lines of research: essentialism, generic language, and object history....
Source: American Psychologist - March 9, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
