Racism and African American Mental Health

I have written a few posts about the effects of prior, earlier American racism on African American psychology and how that interacts currently with White preconceptions resulting in a “game without end,” so that common ground is difficult to establish. I’ve been quite clear in saying that despite much progress, there is still a fair amount of both implicit and explicit racism in society, especially in the criminal justice system. 

The usual criticism I get when I write about racism from certain people is that as a white person I have no business opining about such things because I haven’t had the personal experiences that Black people have. (In some circles people also say all whites are responsible for systemic racism, as if tribalism isn’t a major influence all over the world on everyone, but that’s another story).

Well, while it’s true I haven’t experienced certain things personally, such experiences as personal observations, reading different black writers, seeing black patients in psychotherapy, and gaining knowledge of common psychological processes such as the intergenerational transfer of trauma do not count for nothing. If that were true, therapists would never be able to help anyone who was not a personal clone who had never left their sides and were treated the same way by everyone they came in contact with.

Janee M. Steele, Ph.D a black author, wrote a book called Racism and African American Mental Health: Using Cognitive Behavior Therapy to Empower Healing. She was interviewed by Judith Beck, daughter of CBT founder Aaron Beck, and she said a few things that are highly consistent with my viewpoint.

Steele is s a cognitive behavioral therapist, so I would assume she doesn’t do genograms on her patients to uncover the history of a patient's family's past family trauma. Therefore, she may not know all of the implications of her ideas.

She describes a Black woman patient of hers who had significant performance anxiety at work, especially while being observed by her bosses and fellow (white) workers. She told the author she was concerned about being falsely labeled with racist stereotypes. Ms. Steele picked up on the fact that at least some of her anxiety was that these concerns were being attributed to stereotype threat rather than personal deficits.

Although Ms. Steele didn’t say this specifically, it sounded as if the patient had, as of yet, no actual experience with racist attitudes at the job. Furthermore, she was a good employee. While I agree with Ms. Steele that she should be cognizant of stereotype threats at work, and that a sense of powerlessness and internalized anti-Black attitudes may be a factor, I’m not certain the author knows some important ideas about how that may play out.

I have two questions. Why would her patient  ever consider any racist comments to be a valid description of her abilities? She knows very well what she can do. Second, if she were to have such an experience, why couldn’t she  just say in her mind to the offender (or even out loud if there would probably be no other consequences), “f*** off, you ignorant a-hole,” and then go about her business.

These issues are relatively common in minority communities, but are particularly prevalent among African Americans. It makes sense, however, that being overly anxious about doing this may have come about because of fears of her family for several generations of being “uppity,” which in the not-too-distant past could literally get you killed. Even though lynching is not a big issue any more, children can be confused about how much of their intrinsic abilities it would be wise to exhibit even now. Furthermore, these feeling engender a sense of mistrust of other people that may adversely affect their relationships.

The author goes into detail about internalized racism and resultant self-hatred and the devaluation of other Black people. These “core beliefs” result in feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness, and self-blaming. With the above client, she asks about her opinions about racial stereotypes. How did she learn them? Where did they come from? She blamed them on her treatment during her elementary school experiences and the portrayal of Black people on TV. But why should she start to seem to believe some of the stereotypes when they were not true.

To further add to my point, she apparently never mentioned what she learned about racism from her parents and other family members, and their childhood experiences and feeling ashamed of themselves. (They were often ashamed of their being powerless, not of their inherent capabilities). The CBT approach to her was to change the patient’s opinions about black people without invalidating her experiences. A worthy goal indeed.

In the interview, Steele talks about problems experienced by white therapists working with black people. There can be discomfort due to the white folk’s apathy, guilt, and vulnerability. But couldn’t plain old ignorance also be an issue? The author does mention a fear of inadvertently saying something rude or potentially offensive. And there is no mention of therapists who may have a relative lack of understanding of race issues facing a patient who doesn’t trust them to begin with – leading to the game without end mentioned in a previous post.

The author then goes on to talk about the underutilization of mental health services by Black people. She mentions something one of my own black patients told me: people in that patient’s church discouraging use of therapists and saying these folks just need to pray harder.

As the author correctly points out, there may very well be denial of racism by white people who are covertly promoting anti-Black attitudes and discrimination. But it can also be due to inexperience dealing with a variety of other cultures including Blacks with no ulterior motives at all. Just ignorance. Certain sectors in American society seemingly deny that there has been any racial progress at all, even during and after the civil rights movement.

A patient should try to keep an open mind about a therapist until they actually do or say something overtly racist.

 

 

Racism in Medicine

Opening of anatomical theater at medical faculty at Bogomolets National Medical University circa 1853

                                               Unknown author.  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

 

When I read the program for any medical meeting, such as the annual American Psychiatric Convention, there has for years been a plethora of talks and  forums about racism in medicine, equity and diversity, and the like. Perhaps medical offices really are rife with bigotry and a lack of concern for minorities – particularly black people.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there is still some racism in medical practice perpetrated by today’s doctors, just as in the rest of society. But people seem to lose sight of the fact that there has been tremendous progress in decreasing it in most of U.S. society. As author Steven Pinker writes in his book Enlightenment Now: "But it's in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come." (p. 215).

I once got into an argument with a young African American woman about this. She said there hadn’t been any progress here, even after the civil rights movement!  The odd thing was that at the time we were enjoying a meal at a restaurant here in Memphis. I reminded her that when I was a kid, we wouldn’t have been allowed to eat together like that. In fact, she probably would not have been allowed in the restaurant at all. Her answer? Something to the effect of “Well, they still don’t like us here. It was probably better when it was out in the open.”  Really? 

The problem with poor outcomes in medical treatment for Black patients has several different causes besides racism, such as poverty, the crazy medical insurance situation in the U.S., and what I'm about to talk about. To hasten further progress, ALL of the various causes should be addressed. And before accusing me of "blaming the victim" in what I'm about to discuss, please keep two things in mind. 1. Just because behavior can be easily understood and justified does not automatically mean that it can't also be counterproductive. 2. When it comes to the results of repetitive human interactions in current U.S. society, "It's all my fault" and "I had nothing to do with it" are almost always false positions to take.

I’ve written before about the “game without end” aspect of relationships between Blacks and Whites (7/23/13, 1/17/13, 4/3/12). The basic point is that a lot of difficulties in the current relationships between Blacks and Whites stems from past racism, not current racism.

In a study presented at the 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, Somnath Saha reported that he had came across a cluster of studies showing that black people with cardiovascular disease were treated less aggressively compared to White people. This professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University began poring through medical records. He found that doctors are more likely to use negative language when describing a Black patient than they are with a White patient. He found them described as “really difficult,” “non-compliant,” and “uninterested in their health.”  He attributed this to implicit bias by physicians— unconscious judgments that can affect behavior.

Now, again, implicit bias is a real thing. We ALL profile other people, because we can't read minds. But is that the whole picture? Two studies bring up an important point. In an article talking about Saha’s study, Antoinette M. Schoenthaler (a professor of population health and medicine at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine), said that disparities in pain management are pervasive and widespread across the medical profession. But she also mentions a reason for it that is seldom brought up: "Patients of color go into an appointment with feelings of heightened anxiety because they're expecting mistreatment.;  we've seen minoritized patients have higher blood pressure in the context of a clinical visit because of these expectations of anxiety and fear, and disappointment."

Medical mistrust leads to greater health disparities in minority communities, according to a poster presentation at DNPs of Color annual meeting held in Washington, DC, October, 2023. It is not a phenomenon but a “true medical issue,” said Clydie Coward-Murrell, MSN-Ed, BSN, RN, an African-American. “This clinical issue is not as prevalent in other minority communities simply because of the atrocities in health care that African Americans had to suffer for hundreds of years.

Can anyone blame black patients for being suspicious of white doctors? They seem to all know about the Tuskeegee syphillus experiment in which severe damage was done to black patients. They may even know that black surgery patients were in the past given less anesthesia than whites because doctors thought they had a higher pain tolerance – a myth left over from slavery times invented by slaveowners so they would not feel so bad about whipping them. They'd literally have to be crazy to completely trust doctors.

So maybe that’s part of why they seem to be angry and non-compliant with medical treatments? And if that’s true, then couldn’t that be a significant factor in explaining why other studies show that black patients seem to have worse outcomes than white patients with similar conditions? Because they don’t follow doctors’ orders as blindly? In that vein, let me tell you what one of my black psychotherapy patients told me: She had to hide the fact that she was seeing a therapist because her fellow church members would give her an extremely nasty round of criticism if they knew. Accusing her of just not praying hard enough.

In my own experience as a medical student, resident, and psychiatrist, I have not personally witnessed a whole lot of obvious racism in my instructors and colleagues. Of course I am not black so I might not have seen racism that was present since it would not be directed at me. But I was a residency training director at a Southern medical school for 16 years. I had a lot of black psychiatry residents, and none of them complained about this. 

We were told by the dean in charge of residency programs that, although our school did not have affirmative action, if there was a black applicant and a white one of roughly equal qualifications, to take the black one.

The only time I ever personally witnessed really nasty racism (and simultaneous sexism) among doctors was way back in the early 70’s when I was a medical student in San Francisco. Clearly, my school was ahead of its time so I had a biased sample – my class was 20% female at a time when there were a lot fewer elsewhere (there are now more female medical students than male ones). A Black female classmate wanted to become an orthopedic surgeon. Surgeons were by far the biggest Neanderthals for these issues back then. Boy, did they ever give her a raft you know what when she applied.

So all this talk among doctors about how racist they all are is not something that only they hear. Black people hear it too. So what they are hearing is that they are right to be suspicious of white doctors. While racism in medicine must still be addressed, talking about it way too much has the potential to backfire and make the problem worse rather than better.

Drug Abuse “Intervention:” Why it Works

In Jonah’s Berger’s excellent new book, The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind, he discusses effective ways to get people to look at things in new ways. Even die hard ideologues can sometimes be reached using many of his methods. He also talks about why persuasive arguments and presenting new information in an effort by one person to get another person to reconsider entrenched positions usually does not work. 

In the chapter called “corroborating evidence,” he uses a successful “intervention” with a drug abuser to illustrate how, in influencing others, having multiple people give information is often much more powerful than just one person’s speaking , especially when the multiple sources are all operating at or near the same time. 

In the Intervention technique in substance abuse treatment, the actual intervention is having an outside therapist come in and coach the family members to write out a speech about how much they care about the user and how his or her behavior is hurting everyone. They are instructed to avoid telling him what to do. Nonetheless, the therapist has a rehab facility lined up in hopes that the object of the intervention will agree to do something about his “problem.”

They each say how sad they are because of the problem and how much they miss him and want the drug abuser “back.” They also give the addict the message, “If you want to be an addict, we can’t stop you. But if you want to get high, you aren’t going to do it here.” 

With families, Berger points out, several members have often -  over time and individually – “asked, begged, yelled, screamed, and threatened. All to no avail.” But then he goes on to say things that consist of the usual wisdom about these sorts of things, such as “They (addicts) don’t believe they have a problem.” They are “in denial.” They may not remember wrapping a car around a lamp post” because they “blacked out.” If an addict doesn’t think he has a reason to quit, “is one person really going to change their mind?”

That sounds reasonable, but is it really? Doesn’t the addict find out what happened to the car after he comes to? Isn’t losing a good job and resorting to crime to finance an addiction considered by the drug abuser to be problems? As I often say, he would have to have the IQ of a kumquat – or maybe a rutabaga, I’m not really sure – to not “know” he had a problem. So what’s really going on here?

Berger attributes the relatively high success rates of organized family “interventions” to the number of people giving a similar message. He's partly correct. But he also seems subliminally aware that there is something else going on here. He states, “In order to get addicts to change, their entire ecosystem has to be altered. Without realizing it, friends and family members may be unintentionally enabling the problems. So for change to stick, the whole system has to change…”

Was the particular family the author described enabling the abuser, “Phil”? Why as a matter of fact, quite so. In the author’s description, the family didn’t seem to think of him as an addict for extended periods, especially at first, because he had a job and didn’t steal to support his habit. He did start to steal a bit later. They sent him to rehab 19 different times even though each of them was unsuccessful. They repeatedly let him move back home. They resorted to having him sign a contract promising to turn over a new leaf, but all that did was to “train him to be a better liar.”

Hearing this, it might seem fairly clear why Phil may have thought his family was actually invested in him continuing to be an addict, because they made it so damn easy! Unlike most of us, they know that family members are not that stupid even if they seem to be “in denial.” Of course, I have to put the usual caution here: since I haven’t personally evaluated this family I can’t say what follows with certainty, although IMO what I am about to describe is extremely likely.

Another hint that the above formulation may be on the mark is a statement by the book author that "family was everything to Phil." The author thinks that Phil realizing he was tearing the others to shreds was the motive for quitting. But again, how could Phil possibly think that this hadn't been the case all along? Because he thought the family needed him to be an addict!

In dysfunctional families with shared conflicts over certain behavior, say for example puritanical attitudes towards work and intoxication, several members are usually involved in either enabling or refusing to notice the problems of the addict. The addict is actually taking the cue to deny that he has a problem from the family. When one member occasionally seems to object about addict-like behavior, another family member may give the addict the opposite message. In such a situation, this can become a game without end even more easily than when just two people are stuck in this game. So no wonder the addict ignores the asking, begging, yelling, screaming, and threatening from any one family member.

However, when the whole family comes together to give the same message – that they all will no longer deny that the addiction has become a problem — and all clearly state that all of their enabling behavior in toto is going to cease, their wanting him to stop becomes far more believable. So it isn’t just multiple sources of info as Berger assumes, but the fact that they are all indirectly acknowledging their own contributions to the addict’s continuing addiction.

Of course, the addict may still be skeptical. If Phil leaves yet another rehab program without success, and his parents still let him return home, nothing will stick. In this case, that fortunately did not happen.

Themes of This Blog Seen In Newspaper Advice Columns: The Game without End, Gender Role Division

In Amy Dickinson’s advice columns of 5/29, 6/14 and 6/18/17, and in Carolyn Hax’s column of 6/23/17, the Agony aunts published letters which serve as a good, simple and straightforward illustrations of something that family therapists have called the game without end, described in several previous posts.

Whenever one member of a couple or a family makes a good case for changing the rules by which people in the family operate, other members of the family (or the other member of the couple) get suspicious. The person making the request has always followed the old rules. I mean, they say they want things to be different, but do they really?

So the person making the request gets “tested” to see how sincere their request really is. The others make the requested changes, but do so in an obnoxious or annoying manner. My favorite illustration of this is a situation widely created by rapidly evolving changes in gender role functioning, which the letters that are the subject of the current post clearly illustrate.

Both members of a couple work, but somehow everyone - including the females - has always expected the female to do all or most of the housework due to the rules followed by earlier generations of men and women.  The woman often has treated the kitchen, for example, as her own personal fiefdom in which she is the undisputed boss of how things are supposed to be done.

If she suddenly asks her husband or boyfriend to help clean up and do his share of the cooking, he wonders if she really wants that - because of her prior attitude and the accompanying behavior, which had been readily and repeatedly observable up to this point.

So, when it’s his turn to clean the kitchen, he does a half-baked job and puts the dishes and pots and pans in all new places, so that his partner cannot find them when it’s her turn to do, say the cooking. Or he does any of numerous other passive-aggressive things that annoy the heck out of her. So she criticizes him unmercifully for his poor performance.

In a sense, she starts criticizing him for doing the very thing she had asked him to do in the first place.

His conclusion: "See, she really didn’t want me to help out after all." I can never understand why he discounts his own behavior in drawing this conclusion, but that is highly typical.

An effective way to handle a game without end so that the rules really can change is described here.

So for those readers to are skeptical, here are some abbreviated letters from the advice columnists:

5/29/17. Dear Amy: I am really tired of my husband asking: “How can I help you?” “What can I do for you?” or “What do you need?”Here’s why this upsets me: If I am cooking dinner for the both of us and he asks, “What can I do for you?” I think, well, you are eating this dinner too, so why not just ask, “What can I do?” Why is he offering to do something “for me”? I get so frustrated that my response is: “…nothing.” When I suggest that he just pitch in, he tells me that I do these household things so much better than he does. 

He seems to want me to need him. I don’t need him. I just want him to initiate the household work on his own. He watches TV while I run around picking up the house or making dinner, and his only response is, “Am I in your way?”...When he finally does something like putting a load in the washer, he needs to announce it like it’s the second coming. What can I do? - — Frustrated!

A response from a man to the above letter: 6/14/17. Dear Amy: I am a man who has been in the same position as “Frustrated’s” husband, who would ask, “What can I do for you?” instead of just taking responsibility for his half of the household chores. I used to be like this. I just didn’t know how to be helpful and I didn’t want to get in the way. Honestly, my wife basically trained me how to take on more responsibility and now we work together. — Reformed (This guy is still letting her be the boss!)

Dear Reformed: I have received a huge response to this letter, and many men echo your statement — they needed some guidance and when they got it, they stepped up.

6/18/17. Above letter, continued. Dear Amy: I understand a lot of men are responding to the letter from “Frustrated!” about her husband’s lack of initiative regarding household chores. In my case, I jump in and do my best, but my efforts are criticized and belittled. It is hardly inspiring me to do more. — Also Frustrated

6/23/17.  Dear Carolyn: I love my partner. He recently moved in... I’m so tired of people who won’t clean up after themselves and leave it until I do it. I made it very clear to my partner before he moved in that it was important to me...But I’m already tired of asking and I’ve been reading about “the mental load.” Like last night: I was stressed and headed to my second job and he asked what he could do to make me feel better (sweet!) so I said, get wrapping paper and a card and wrap your sister’s wedding present. And when I got home later, he had! But. The box was left out instead of recycled, the couple of dishes I used to feed us before I went to work weren’t done, the living room was a mess . . . he just doesn’t see it…— I’m Already Tired

The Individual or the Family for Psychotherapy?

My interest as a therapist has always been finding what is called a "metatheory." Psychological theories, particularly those which try to explain why people who seek therapy are often so self-destructive, tend to focus on just one aspect of the problem almost to the exclusion of many other important considerations. 

In looking at patients, therapists from different "schools" of therapy that deal only with individuals focus solely on just one of the following: environmental factors which seem to trigger the behaviors, thoughts that are irrational and lead to counterproductive feelings and behaviors, seemingly inappropriate affects, or internal conflicts which pit one’s biological urges against values learned and internalized from one’s family or culture. 

Psychiatrists these days tend to focus just on biological and neurological processes.

Therapists with training in social psychology or family systems theory may look at either the family dynamics or at larger sociocultural influences.

There are mental health professions who are trying to counter this myopia (also called reductionism) and who would like to integrate all of these viewpoints. The typical metaphor employed by those folks is the famous story of the blind men and the elephant. One blind man feels the tail of the beast and makes conclusions about what the elephant looks like based solely on this, while others feel other parts of the elephant such as the hind quarters or the trunk, and make conclusions about the what the elephant might look like from those alone.

Some "integrationists” want to look at the whole elephant, so to speak, but are overly cautious about it. They stick to just looking for commonalities among the theories of the various blind men, rather than the whole picture. They are afraid that "integrated" therapy would be just one more school. This is reflected in the absurd name of their organization: Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration (SEPI). 

In other words, do not actually integrate anything, just "explore" the possibility. Luckily, there are a few members of SEPI who want to understand the whole elephant as a complete unit unto itself. I count myself among their number, and am part of something called the Unified Psychotherapy Project.

My main theory, which is the force behind the type of psychotherapy I do with those of my patients who present with repetitive self-destructive behavior patterns -  I call it Unified Therapy - looks at the relationship between individuals and their internal processes, and the processes of the social groups to which they belong. Many of the conclusions I have drawn are based on the following series of propositions:

1.            The relationship between a self and its social system is not a constant but a variable.

2.             As children get older, their "self" differentiates from it social system - in most cases his or her family of origin - in a process known as separation-individuation. In other words, children gradually gain the ability to separate and express their own intellectual and emotional functioning when it is different from or disagrees with that of most of their family members.

3.             All individuals go through this process as they negotiate the passages of individual development whether they want to or not.

4.     Human culture has evolved over history so that, at each stage of human childhood and adult development, individuals have been able to differentiate more and more from the collec­tive as they go through the process of separation-individuation. The overall balance between individual expression and group conformity has, at least in developed countries, gradually shifted over history towards the former.

5.             Consensual validation from other members of the family system is necessary for  individuals to feel comfortable expressing individuated behavior, also called self-actualization.

6.             Because individuals have an inborn biological propensity to concern       themselves with the survival of the species, they are willing to sacrifice themselves, or aspects of themselves, in order to further what they perceive to be the greater good of their own family and ethnic group (kin selection).

7.             When individuals find that certain differentiated aspects of self seem to threaten the immediate representatives of the species, the family system, they will attempt to sup­press or completely sacrifice those self-aspects.

8.             In order to do so, they develop a false self, or persona, which is then maintained by a variety of self-suppressive devices such as self-scaring through the irrational thoughts catalogued by cognitive therapists (catastrophizing for example)- also called self-mortification - and through the use of the traditional defense mechanisms catalogued by psychoanalysts like Anna Freud. The de­velopment of a persona often causes individuals to appear to be incapable of certain kinds of activities, which makes them appear to be defective in ways that they are not.

9.             The needs of the family system to respond to the cultural forces which seem to mandate the evolu­tion of increased self-actualization often conflict with the needs of the system for stability and predictability (family homeostasis).

10.              Younger members of the family are often induced by the needs of the larger culture to behave in a fashion that is far more differentiated than the behavior of the parents. The parents, who are the leaders of the family system and its most important constituents, may be unable to com­fortably tolerate such behavior, even when they are them­selves attracted to it. The whole family system becomes threat­ened.

11.              This problem often cannot be solved in ways other than through the sacrifice of the younger system members' individuality because of two factors: the tendency of fam­ily members to protect one another from anxiety and shame, leading to an avoidance of discussing what is going on between them (metacommunication), and secondly, the tendency of family members to rely on past experience in evaluating new family behavior, leading to the so-called game without end.

12.             These factors not only lead to impaired individual func­tioning but hamper the family from adjusting to new cul­tural contingencies. The efforts of individuals to protect one another, in particular, lead to eventual harm for everyone. I call this the altruistic paradox (or sometimes the Mother Teresa paradox).

A therapist can help solve the problem of self-sacrifice by work­ing with individuals and teaching them how to avoid the difficul­ties that lead to impaired family problem solving. The pioneer in this approach was Murray Bowen. He used education, logic, and collaboration to coach his patients on how to deal differently with their families. However, what he tought them often involved techniques other than education, logic, and cooperation. 

In Unified Therapy, the  ther­apist instead teaches patients to adopt a problem-solving ap­proach with their families.

Specifically, patients can learn to overcome both their own and their family's resistances to metacommunicating about family difficulties. They can learn to bring up systemic problems in ways that do not induce negative reactions from other members of their family systems. The keys to effective metacommunica­tion are empathy, avoidance of moralistic blaming behavior, and respect for the integrity and potency of all family members.

In therapy, patients come to an expert to learn how they are induced by the reactions of others to behave in self-destruc­tive ways and why the others behave in the ways that they do. Patients learn to empathize with and understand the reasons for the negative behavior of other system members without agree­ing that the behavior is good and without sacrificing their own thoughts or emotions.

They learn to differentiate between emotional reac­tivity and emotional reactions. They learn to tolerate and to sub­vert attempts made by other family members to stop them from proceeding in the task of metacommunicating. They have an op­portunity to practice what they have learned by role playing with the therapist.

Specifically, the patient is trained to deal with various maneuvers that the rest of the system uses to get them to shut up and not challenge the rules by which the family operates. These maneuvers represent attempts to withdraw consen­sual validation from the patient and include such things as accusations of self­ishness, changing the subject, unreasonable behavior, double binds, blame shifting, nitpicking, overgeneralization, mental gymnastics, and fatalism. 

The patient is also trained to prevent family members from uniting in various combinations to defeat the patient's efforts to metacommunicate. Once the systemic problem has been dealt with, mal­adaptive and self-destructive behavior problems begin to disappear, along with many types of anxiety and mood symptoms. 

Medical Racism in America: a Giant Mind-Boggling Game Without End

An explosive book that came out last year, Black and Blue:  the Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism, should have reverberated throughout the medical community and caused we physicians to closely examine our own prejudices and how they have affected the behavior of, and our relationships with, our black patients. 

So of course there has hardly been a whimper in the medical community. I did see a rather bland, "balanced" (almost namby-pamby) review by two African-American psychiatrists in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association. I don’t think much will come of it.

The author of the book, University of Texas professor John Hoberman, explains many of the reasons why the medical profession does not look at itself much in this regard, most of which I will not discuss in detail here. One of the biggest reasons can be summed up in one phrase: the mutual estrangement of puzzled Whites and resentful Blacks.

John Hoberman

Just to be extremely clear, there is no doubt that the problem of racist beliefs in medicine started with white racists and not their black victims. Many of the ideas about physical and mental differences between Blacks and Whites came from the colonialist opinions of Europians that Africans were more primitive than white people – less further along than Whites on the evolutionarily scale and therefore sub-human. Thus, their bodies and minds were supposedly simpler and therefore less or more prone to certain diseases. 

As seen originally by colonialists,  the black body, being more simple, was hardier than the white one. Black skin, for example, was thought to be tougher. This conveniently provided slaveholders a justification for working their slaves in the cotton fields for long hours in the hot sun. At the same  time, being supposedly simpler mentally, slaves could be thought of as less likely to get depressed, so the myth was born of the happy black slave, grinning from ear to ear with his strong white teeth while eating watermelon, content being taken care of by his benign white masters.

While physicians in general no longer express these ideas, derivatives of them became part of medical folklore and were passed down as an oral tradition from medical student to medical student. For example, observations by white doctors of what a non-naïve individual would see as the understandable reluctance of Blacks to be put under anesthesia (and therefore under the complete control of a potentially racist doctor), was instead put together with the notion of black hardiness, and voila!  Black patients are far less likely even today of being given adequate anesthesia during surgery.

Hoberman describes in detail how racist ideas from the past have morphed into medical folklore about Blacks concerning the treatment of diseases of nearly every organ system.

Disparities in the health care of white and black patients such as the one just mentioned have been endlessly documented, so their existence should not be in the least controversial. White doctors unfamiliar with the racist history of American medicine, however, are likely to misinterpret the mistrust of their black patients as an innate tendency to be non compliant - or just plain lazy - which in turn makes the white doctor reluctant to put a whole lot of energy into convincing black patients to follow their advice.

Black patients have good reasons for their mistrust of the medical profession, including of psychiatrists.  White physicians tend to think that 1962 was a long time ago.  That was the year the American Medical Association stopped deferring to Southern state medical associations (doctors have to join the state and national associations at the same time), and allowed all African American physicians to become members.

Then again, I guess 1972, while more recent, seems like the distant past to such physicians.  That was when the Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment came to public light -  a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of the untreated disease in rural African American men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government. The men were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it.

When I moved to Memphis, I was impressed that seemingly every African American I spoke with was aware of this history – even those who were not particularly educated.  For white doctors, not so much. Unfortunately, human beings have very long memories. The Serbs and Albanians, for example, still have strong feelings about a battle that was fought in the year 1389! 

It doesn’t help when white doctors like conservative commentator Sally Satel blame treatment disparities entirely on the resistant attitudes of black people without any reference to this history.  She also writes that racial profiling is important in medicine and justifies this idea (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/05/magazine/i-am-a-racially-profiling-doctor.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm) with the example of the implications for choosing medications based on the real difference in the racial distribution of different versions of enzymes that metabolize certain drugs (different alleles on the genes responsible for producing the metabolizing enzymes). 

In picking on one of the extremely few areas where there actually are racial differences, she ignores the far greater quantity of ideas within medical folklore purporting differences that do not in fact exist.  Like the supposed proneness of the black brain to produce hallucinations in psychiatric disorders, for example (originally attributed by doctors to its “primitive” state).

The mistrust of racism in medicine has unfortunately led a significant proportion of Blacks to believe in some seemingly far-fetched conspiracy theories. Many Blacks believe HIV and birth control programs were invented and designed by the white establishment in order to commit genocide against minority groups. 

These conspiracy theories even reached all the way to Africa, leading to the disasterous AIDS policies of South African president Thabo Mbeki. To most Whites, these theories sound completely irrational and paranoid. Of course, historically, Planned Parenthood was indeed founded by an Anglo-American eugenicist, one of whose goals was to limit the number of children of east European immigrants to the United States, whom she considered genetically inferior beings.

There is also a rather crazymaking problem for Whites who attempt to take an interest in the whole problem of the consequences of racism on black folks. This problem was exemplified by the vicious attacks on Senator Patrick Moynihan for his 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The report discussed the “pathology” that racism had created for many Blacks and their families.

According to the Hoberman’s book, the black intelligentsia protested the report with sentiments something akin to, “How dare some white social scientists tell black people who and what they are?”  They thought that the report pathologized and stigmatized black urban culture, and that it seemed to be an oblique endorsement of old racist biology that regarded black people as inherently diseased and beyond salvation.

This has led to a situation where even today it is considered a breach of academic etiquette for any white social scientist to theorize about Black culture. I personally was crazy enough to do some of that in my first book, since a problem seen frequently in the Black urban poor community provided the clearest example of a point about the development of family system dynamics I was trying to make. Fortunately - I guess - that section of my book was completely ignored by reviewers. Whew!

So one of the reasons that white doctors are reluctant to look at their own attitudes and the history and consequences of medical racism is a fear of open discussions about that very subject. They do not want to be considered racists. So what are they supposed to say?  That racism did not create a host of problems for African Americans, so they do not seem to pathologize them and over-generalize about them? If it did not, then what is the big deal? If they ignore the problems, they could then be accused of covertly wanting racist practices to continue. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Maybe if we just do not bring up the subject, no one will notice. Except maybe for that troublemaker Hoberman.

So here we have the explanation  for the “mutual estrangement of puzzled Whites and resentful Blacks” phenomenon. To oversimplify a bit, Blacks will not tell doctors that they are mistrustful of white doctors (and of Black doctors as well, for reasons discussed in the Hoberman’s book) for fear of being labeled as paranoid, and white doctors are afraid of getting labeled as racist no matter how they discuss the problem!

This is a perfect example of the family system game without end on a larger, societal scale, which makes solving this problem so devilishly difficult. No one trusts anyone else who claims they want things to be different, so anything anyone does or says can be - and invariably is - reframed as just the same old thing – just another manifestation of the Black belief in the incorrigible racism of all Whites, or of the White belief in the presence of innate Black pathology and inferiority. No wonder we get stuck!

This game without end can lead to paradoxical and at times bizarre situations. Hoberman bemoans the fact that black kids are much less likely to get stimulants for “ADHD” than white kids, which he attributes partially to white doctors’ subconscious belief in the stereotype of the “happy Negro” described above. Black mothers, on the other hand, do not want their kids to take these drugs because they believe that the drugs would be used to pacify young black males and rob them of their spontaneity, thereby making social control of Black people easier.

I doubt that the motives of most White doctors are that pernicious, but the mothers are actually right about the effects of the drugs. In this case, the idea that stimulants are being used to control behavior is correct, and the black kids are better off not getting the drugs. The problem is not, as Hoberman implies, that black children are not getting a needed medication, but that too many white kids are getting medication they do not need instead of getting family therapy! Of course, black families are not getting as much of that as white families either.

The author’s solution to the problem of medical racism, although he probably does not know about the concept of the game without end nor necessarily totally appreciate the intricacies of interpersonal miscommunication, is for medical schools to teach the history of medical racism and about the presence of incorrect folkloric beliefs that many physicians still hold. This way, the doctors would hopefully not misinterpret the lack of cooperation they receive from their black patients, and take time to explain more about what they are recommending, and reassure the patients that they understand any reluctance the patient may have to follow their doctorly advice. 

Hoberman admits, however, that there are not very many people available who are qualified to even begin to teach such a course.

As to his book itself, it is sometimes annoyingly repetitive, and at time a little confusing. When he discusses discrepancies in the care of black and white patients, it is sometimes unclear if his examples are due in his opinion to medical mythology, a misunderstanding of actual differences, black mistrust of white doctors, or all of the above. Nonetheless, since there aren’t many books that take this whole subject on, I recommend it.