Call for a ‘Live Third’: The Impact of Institutional and Psychiatric Racism on Adebayo’s Physical and Mental Health
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17140/PCSOJ-6-156Keywords:
Black people, Trauma, Mental health, Psychiatric racism, Schizophrenia.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.
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