Psychology and Cognitive Sciences · Vol. 6, No. 1 · 2020 · pp. 25–30 · e-ISSN 2380-727X

Call for a ‘Live Third’: The Impact of Institutional and Psychiatric Racism on Adebayo’s Physical and Mental Health

Abi Canepa-Anson

Psychotherapist,Westminster Pastoral Foundation (WPF), London, UKUnited Kingdom

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17140/pcsoj-6-156 · Published 2020-09-14 · Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 · © 2020 The Author(s)

Also available as PDF (figures and tables appear in the PDF).

Abstract

The author refers to a personal experience and feels it important to do so in order to highlight a crippling and appalling inhumanity by some towards black people. Much of what is written here is presented in the first person owing to the personal nature of the narrative. It manifests through stereotyping, stigmatisation, and racism towards non-white people. Racism is both institutional and interpersonal, and it is endemic. What gets played out in society is often repeated at an individual level. As a psychotherapist, the author affirms the need for clinical practitioners to move from a position of dismissal and objectification of Black lives, and to wake up to the terrifying fact of the early mortality of black people’s lives from the trauma of racism which is very much imbedded in institutional policies and procedures.

Keywords: Black people; Trauma; Mental health; Psychiatric racism; Schizophrenia

Conclusion

A recognition of the problem created by racism and psychiatric misdiagnosis and its manifestation is essential. Psychotherapists and other psych professionals, will soon be working with the next generation, the generation of children of refugees, asylum seek ers, and migrant families. Trauma in the form of multiple losses, stresses, abuse, and physical and emotional molestations as well as socioeconomic factors, education, fear, and anxiety will influ ence disease development. Instead of waiting and treating complex personality disorders as psychiatric disorders, often unsuccessfully, early therapeutic intervention would offer an opportunity to prevent psychiatric disorders.

We can provide adequate and supportive environments and not further traumatise the already traumatised. Disorders that have genetic and environmental components, often have more to do with colonisation, wars and conflict torn countries as a result of trans generational transmission of oppression, manifest as stress and anxiety disorders. They have a better chance of a cure with early therapeutic intervention as early as the trajectories towards disease will not yet have been established.

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