guest post by Ray Littleford of Desert Palm UCC; this post originally appeared in the Desert Breeze
February 14 may be Valentine’s Day, and in the United Church of Christ, it is also designated as Racial Justice Sunday, and the theme across the denomination is Compassionate Community. It is well established that experiencing racial discrimination often leads to mental health problems that detract from quality-of-life over the course of a year or even a lifetime. Numerous studies have found that rates of anxiety, depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are significantly higher among minority groups in the United States.
Historically, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first American physician to study mental disorders, declared that Negroes were not inferior to Whites. In the 1850s, however, Dr. Samuel Cartwright defined “drapetomania” as the disease which causes slaves to run away, and “dysaethesia aethiopica” as the condition that causes laziness and made slaves insensitive to punishment. A century later it was theorized that the urban violence among blacks in the 1960s was due to brain dysfunction.
There is also the problem of the over-diagnosis of schizophrenia among African-American males, nearly four times greater than that of white males. The diagnosis was applied to many hostile and aggressive black men, and then they were treated with high doses of antipsychotic medications.
Articles in prominent journals of mental health and psychiatry have explored the reluctance of African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans and Latinx individuals to seek mental health treatment. Cultural paranoia and lack of trust in the medical community are often mentioned, as well as concerns regarding the cultural competence and understanding of clinicians. Mental health professionals are predominantly white (e.g. only 2% of US psychologists are African-American) so these professions need to do a better job of attracting minority groups.
Finally, another area of discrimination is the lack of awareness by physicians of physiological differences of various racial groups in how medications are metabolized by the liver. This can result in either toxic levels of medications or ineffective levels. If you have tried several different psychiatric medications with poor results, then ask your physician to order genetic testing of the liver enzymes. Most insurance plans will authorize it, and then the test results can point to the medications that are well metabolized by your liver, not too fast or too slow.
I believe we are making progress in reducing the stigma of mental illness in the general population. It behooves us to extend this progress to people of all races and ethnicities so that biases in diagnosis and accessibility to treatment are eliminated. As members of DPUCC, our witness to the community is that everyone is welcome here. In the words of the Apostle Paul:
If our Message is obscure to anyone, it’s not because we’re holding back in any way. No, it’s because these other people are looking or going the wrong way and refuse to give it serious attention. All they have eyes for is the fashionable god of darkness. They think he can give them what they want, and that they won’t have to bother believing a Truth they can’t see. They’re stone-blind to the dayspring brightness of the Message that shines with Christ, who gives us the best picture of God we’ll ever get. Remember, our Message is not about ourselves; we’re proclaiming Jesus Christ, the Master. All we are is messengers, errand runners from Jesus for you. It started when God said, “Light up the darkness!” and our lives filled up with light as we saw and understood God in the face of Christ, all bright and beautiful. (2 Cor 4:3-6, The Message)