‘Ethnic
issues’ in the mental health field: Is psychiatry racist?
Outsider witness practices and group supervision by Hugh Fox, Cathy Tench and Marie, originally published in the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, 2002, No. 4
Imagine
Belonging
Welcome address, 2006 Conference of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, Manchester, 'Listening, Witnessing and Hope' by Anita Franklin
Therapeutic Documents: a review by Hugh Fox This paper was originally created as a keynote at the inaugural Dulwich Centre Summer School of Narrative Practice which was held in Adelaide in November 2003 and subsequently published in the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, 2004, No. 1
‘Ethnic
issues’ in the mental health field: Is psychiatry racist?
by
Suman Fernando
Paper
presented to the Beyond Multi-culturalism: addressing issues of
'race' and privilege Conference, Manchester March 18th 2005
-----------
Introduction
Today in UK a variety of problems often called ‘ethnic issues’ - formerly called ‘race and culture issues’- have emerged during the past 20 or so years.
Ethnic issues in mental health services:
Over
the years, there has been a lot of talk couched in a variety of models – the
biological (both madness and ‘race’ seen as genetic matters), the
social-constructionist (categories of mental illness are cross-culturally
meaningless), the Foucauldian power game ideology (blaming professionals or
‘the state’ – the locations of power) that generalises into argument
that ‘white’ systems always oppress black people, and so on. In fact a
case can be made for each of these explanations if you choose your data
carefully. I do not propose to go along that road but instead to give you a
sort of overview of the topics underlying situation in the mental health field
in order to get an understanding of
what is really going on. My basic argument is that the problems lie, not just
in issues of cultural difference and consequent misunderstandings, not just in
conscious prejudice that we associate with racism or classism or ageism, not
just any one thing really, but a complex situation closely tied up with how
disciplines such as psychiatry and western psychology have developed, how we
see the human condition, what mental health and illness is all about and so
on. But complexity has to be reconstructed as it were for us to formulate some
understanding that has practical implications and of course to communicate
with one another. And for this we use phrases and words and concepts.
One of
the constructs I have found useful is ‘institutional racism’, so I will
tend to come back to that. ‘Multiculturalism’ is another concept that some
people feel has had its day and we should get beyond it - and the title of
this conference suggests this very point. I am not so sure about this –
perhaps what we need is to revise our definition of the term. So, I shall
mention this term too. Cultural diversity is the in-term, at any rate in the
UK, popular with the government and with many people who find the word
‘race’ threatening’. The thing is that these are all words, concepts,
phrases. They may be superseded as time goes on or as the context changes. And
they are bedevilled by the usual problems with words in that they mean
different things to different people. But having said that, we have to get on
as best as we could, not get hung up on semantic discussion but on achieving
understanding. That is why I think we are meeting today to ‘talk
together’, as the blurb to the conference goes, with words - in spite of all
the limitations they set to real understanding.
A
message in many of my books is that the problems depicted as ‘ethnic
issues’ are problems not so much to do with the people but with the
institutions and systems that mental health professionals work in. Ultimately
they are political with a simple ‘p’ and a lot to do with social justice.
The problems are best understood by examining the history of these systems,
the white supremacy ideologies inherent in them, how black people are
traditionally seen and dealt with in these systems, how traditions get
translated into common sense assumptions and so on.
The
talk I give today will be rather discursive but I hope will make some sense on
the road to understanding. I shall first say a few words about discourse in
addressing ethnic issues in mental health services; then take a sort of
statistical overview and historical journey backwards in order to broaden the
picture, and get to discussing concepts of ‘race’, racism and
multiculturalism in the practical politics of British society today. Finally I
shall return to the race and culture issues to make some comments –
conclusions if you like.
A
term used in UK in trying to meet problems faced by black and Asian people is
the term ‘racial inequality’. This term has two implications. First that
‘race’ is a valid category for dividing people up – which of course it
isn’t. And by ‘race’ I mean what generally goes for categories of
‘race’ based on certain items of physical appearance that we assume
indicate deep-seated and widespread differences between people. The second
implication in using the term ‘race inequality’ is that the issues –
‘ethnic issues’ are analogous to issues around inequalities related to
gender, disabilities, age and so on. There are similarities and
cross-references but lumping them all together This is only partially correct
in my view. And the disadvantage of this discourse is diverts attention away
from racism, which I think has a different qualitative dimension to other
‘isms’.
More
recently we have shifted to a ‘diversity’ discourse, taking the focus even
further from racism as the possible location of the key to the problems.
Anti-racism which became race relations has become diversity management.
However, one advantage of the diversity discourse is the implication that
remedies are indeed diverse and it is not a matter of a simple quick fix.
Finally,
the ‘ethnic issues’ discourse implies that facts about difference are
being measured objectively, that medical type research based on measuring
‘factors’ can be used and that we can ignore difficult matters like
racism.
Overview
Now
I think you may know that the ethnic issues at the hard end of the mental
health system are very similar to statistics about the judicial (prison)
system. And since the criminal justice system is seen as one for sociological,
rather than medical-type, study, we have some pointers from there.
Prison
Population in UK 2000: Ethnic Statistics
Rates compared to rate in white population
But
pathways into prison are complex.
Criminal
justice system and ‘race’ - Home Office Statistics 2000
Discrimination
is not at one point but is (as it were) cumulative, the discrimination at each
point building up eventually to a very high number of adult black people in
prison. Also, discrimination is not often obvious – it is subtle, dependent
on assumptions we make about people, stereotypes we have about people, use of
discretion, cultural mis-understanding etc.
A
similar situation exists in schools.
Attainment at primary school African Caribbean Children in Birmingham 1998/9 Statistics
Black
children in British schools do well when they start at school but fall out of
education over the next few years – especially in the case of boys. At least
part of the problem is stereotyping and teacher expectation.
Experience
of black children in multiracial primary schools (1992)
We
see the result in rates of exclusion from school.
Permanent
exclusions from school (1997/8)
As percentage of all school-age children in each ethnic group
(Total number of all exclusions=12,076)
And
this connects with prison statistics because it seems that many boys who are
excluded from school end up in prison.
School exclusion and offending
So
we can see that both discrimination and exclusion accumulate at various points
- school, policing, courts etc. leading to prison. Extrapolating from this to
the mental health field, I believe similar forces operate at various points on
the journey to being sectioned, stigmatized and medicated.
Cumulative
discrimination and exclusion
There
is the initial suspicion of ‘madness’, through inappropriate ways of
making psychiatric assessments, diagnoses based on stereotypes, sectioning
through fear of dangerousness etc. ending up in high compulsory admission
rates. In other words, over-representation in prison or as schizophrenics
compulsorily detained and over medicated may arise in similar ways. There is
no reason to think that this applies in UK only. As an American
psychotherapist Hardy (2001) writing in a publication on the Dulwich Centre
website says, for the African-American, ‘chains and plantations [have been]
replaced with bars and razor wire’. Jesse Jackson speaking in London just
last week pointed to the vast resources implicated today in what he called the
industry of imprisoning African-Americans in the southern states of the US.
And anecdotal reports indicate that black Europeans on the mainland are
over-represented in both secure psychiatric and prison systems.
What
I shall do next is to consider briefly the meaning of racism in today’s
world, especially the concept of institutional racism, then look at examples
of racism in the history of psychiatry and try to apply the understanding that
comes out of this to the experiences of black people at the ‘hard end’ of
psychiatry..
Race,
Racism and Multiculturalism
The concept of ‘race’, as we understand it, is based on selected aspects of physical appearance especially skin colour. But ‘race’ as a biologically determined entity has been dismissed in scientific circles as a basis for dividing up the human race (Jones, 1981). As the book Not in Our Genes (Rose et al., 1984) puts it: ‘Human “racial” differentiation is indeed only skin deep. Any use of racial categories must take its justification from some other source than biology.’ (1984: 127). The source of course is social, historical and political and so some people refer to it as ‘social-race’ (Omi and Winant, 1986 quoted by Estroff and Zimmer, 1994). But the tendency to think of people in terms of their ‘race’, ‘race thinking’ (Barzun, 1965), persists in spite of the unscientific nature of ‘race’ itself – mainly because of racism.
History
of racism
Although
racism may go further back, (see Fryer, 1984), it was during the times of
slavery and colonialism that the dogma of racism became consolidated in
European thinking. As Europe entered the period of its ‘Enlightenment’ in the
seventeenth century, liberty and freedom were highlighted and so-called
‘European values’ were born. Yet at that very time, slavery, the
antithesis of freedom, was in full swing.
Toni
Morrison (1993) is not surprised by this apparent paradox: ‘The concept of
freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom - if it did
not in fact create it - like slavery.’ (1993: 38). It seems that racism is
the construct that helps us to understanding – the key to understanding -
this apparent contradiction in European thinking. I suggest that, if we want
to understand why there are ‘ethnic issues’ or ‘racial inequalities’
in the provision of mental health services that are supposedly based on
notions of ‘illness’ and
‘therapy’ within a medical system that is supposedly a humane pursuit
arising from liberal ideology, here too the key is racism.
Modern
racism
In
his book Racist Culture, Goldberg
(1993) argues that the nature of racism is often driven by history and
context. The ways in which people experience racism varies. Thus racism during
American slavery differs from post-slavery segregationism and each from
current expressions of racism in the US. Racism in South Africa during the
times of apartheid differs from that expressed through inherent economic
inequalities in the post apartheid era. Nineteenth century British racism in
the colonies differs from current manifestations of racism in the UK. Racism
experienced by a person who looks African or Caribbean is different to that
experienced by someone who looks Chinese or South Asian. Unfortunately this
gives rise to misunderstandings and consequent divisions between people –
divisions that undermine the common struggle. Another problem for black people
highlighted recently by Jesse Jackson.
In
such a system, manifestations and locations of racism change constantly,
especially in the face of opposition, need for political correctness in the
language used, and so on. Thus, instead of stating – or implying – that
‘other races’ are inferior, possess some unsavoury characteristic or pose
a threat to social cohesion, the reference is to ‘other’ cultures,
religions, ethnic groups or kinds of people (such as refugees), thought of in
the same way as ‘races’, that is as groups that are unchanging and easily
recognisable usually by physical appearance.
Philomena
Essed (1990), a black woman from The Netherlands, talks of the ‘everyday
racism’ that is the personal experience in the course of day-to-day
interactions between people, implemented through ways of behaving and
socialising. The people who exhibit racism are not necessarily overtly
(racially) prejudiced, although if one examines their attitudes in some depth
racist attitudes may be uncovered. If this approach is taken further, racism
may be manifested in social and political systems because people unwittingly
collude in it, usually because they gain from doing so. This notion of
‘institutional racism’ first appeared in a book by Stokely Carmichael and
Hamilton (1967) - Black Power. The Politics of Liberation in America.
In the report on the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Macpherson (Home
Department, 1999: 28) defines it as follows:
Institutional
Racism
The
problem with the concept of institutional racism is that it seems to play down
the personal impact of racism on the individual and may appear to take
responsibility for racism away from the individuals who exercise power over
others. (‘Its nothing to do with me it’s my institution.’) I think we
need to remind ourselves that the institutions we talk of are not the bricks
and mortar – they are composed of people, include us all black and white.
Culture
At one
time culture was seen as a relatively fixed system of traditional beliefs that
are passed on from generation to generation, for example Leighton and Hughes
(1961) envisaged culture as being composed of ‘shared patterns of belief,
feeling and adaptation which people carry in their minds’. But this
restricted approach to culture has given way to culture being seen as
something that cannot be clearly defined, as something living, dynamic and
changing – a flexible system of values and worldviews that people live by
and create and re-create continuously, a system by which we define our
identities and negotiate our lives.
So a
multicultural society is not one where there are many cultures, each distinct
from one another, but a society that is culturally hybrid. In the UK, the
influences that impinge on our society are from African, Caribbean and other
‘non-western’ cultural traditions as well as the traditional
‘European’, including the Jewish-European, cultures. It is a society where
a plurality of cultures involves us all. But emphases vary so that ‘cultural
groups’ can be delineated where certain cultural forms such as marriage
customs, ways of thinking on particular matters, religious affiliation, main
language etc. mark them out. But these groups are seldom cut off from each
other or from the main majority culture, at least in the British scene.
What
is important to grasp is that the disciplines that inform mental health
services (mainly psychiatry and western psychology) have grown out of a
particular and narrow culturally determined understanding of the human
condition, ideologies about life and so on. In short, society is multicultural
but the disciplines are unicultural.
Racism
in psychiatry
Psychiatry
and western psychology came into being about two to three hundred years ago
within western European culture at a time when crude notions of white racial
superiority became deeply embedded in that culture, resulting in a variety of
myths, stereotypes and superstitions about black people and about cultures
seen as ‘non-European’, ‘Oriental’, or ‘African’ (see Said, 1978;
Bernal, 1987; Eze, 1997). As psychiatry developed in the nineteenth century on
the basis of rising asylum numbers, Social Darwinism, by placing different
races on a hierarchy, played a significant part in the theories that caught on
within psychology and psychiatry. Race was deeply implicated in the concept of
degeneration (Morel, 1852) as an explanation for both mental disorder and
criminality, leading to the construction of schizophrenia and the rise of
eugenics within psychology. I shall illustrate the representation of race in
the history of psychiatry by picking out a few examples.
In
the nineteenth century, psychiatrists in the US argued for the retention of
slavery, quoting statistics allegedly showing that mental illness was more
often reported among freed slaves compared to those who were still in slavery
(Thomas and Sillen, 1972). And it was at that time that the now infamous
mental illness drapetomania was constructed - an illness diagnosed among black
slaves which (according to Cartwright, 1851) ‘manifests itself by an
irrestrainable propensity to run away.’ When John Langdon Down (1866)
surveyed so-called ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ resident in institutions
around London, he identified them as ‘racial throwbacks’ to Ethiopian,
Malay and Mongolian racial types - mostly, he said, they were ‘Mongols’.
Early
in the twentieth century, Stanley Hall (1904), founder of the American Journal
of Psychology and first president of the American Psychological Association
(Thomas and Sillen, 1972: 7), described (in a standard text on adolescence)
Asians, Chinese, Africans and Indigenous Americans as psychologically
‘adolescent races’. About the same time, Kraepelin (1904) observed that
guilt was not seen in Javanese people who became depressed because, he said,
they were ‘a psychically underdeveloped population’ akin to ‘immature
European youth’ (Kraepelin, 1921). Throughout most of the twentieth century,
the apparent rarity of depression among Africans and African-Americans was
attributed to their ‘irresponsible’ nature (Green, 1914), ‘absence of a
sense of responsibility’ (Carothers, 1953) or a ‘striking resemblance
between African thinking and that of leucotomized Europeans’ (Carothers,
1951: 12)- in other words their under-development.
This
under-development theme dies hard and has become woven into thinking in
psychiatry and psychology, affecting diagnoses and assessments It surfaces for
example in the theory on what is put forward as ‘cultural’ differences in
the ability to differentiate emotions proposed by Julian Leff (1973, 1981) –
people from developing countries and African-Americans apparently being at a
lower level on this ability when compared to people from developed countries
and white Americans - and of course in recurring versions of the racist IQ
movement (e.g. Herrnstein and Murray, 1994).
When
Carl Jung visited the United States and found it difficult to understand how
white Americans could be so different culturally from (what he saw as) their
racial counterparts in Europe, he concluded that they were affected by
‘racial infection’ from living too close to Black people. ‘The inferior
man exercises a tremendous pull upon civilized beings who are forced to live
with him...’ (Jung, 1930). And when Freud (1915, 1930) envisaged that the
‘leadership of the human species’ should be taken up by ‘white
nations’ as opposed to ‘primitives’, the latter (to him) included
Melanesian, Polynesian, and Malay people, the native people of Australia,
North and South America and the ‘negro races of Africa’ (Hodge and
Struckmann, 1975). And of course Freud’s Totem
and Taboo argued for an affinity between thinking processes of
non-European ‘primitives’ and European neurotics (see McCulloch, 1995).
So
it is against this background that we come to the present.
Race
and Culture issues
Ethnic
issues in Mental Health Services
The
reasons for the differences represented here are complex and debated over -
just as statistics for ethnic differences in (say) rates of police
stop-and-search are debated over or the reasons for disproportionate numbers
of black people in prison are debated over. But to many black people who
experience stop and search, experience being patients of the mental health
services, and to anyone who understands the nature of institutionalised
racism, who know their history, there is very little doubt as to what the real
problem is, although (as with the criminal justice system) proving it in a
legal sense is not easy.
Today,
in many western societies racism is subtle through institutionalised ways of
doing things and this is more difficult to identify than is blatant racism and
so presents very pernicious effects. It comes through in the training of
professionals that instills a quite unrealistic confidence in the superiority
of the body of knowledge and ways of working within western psychology and
psychiatry as opposed to ideas and knowledge about human beings evident in
non-western cultures. And into this (say) professional arrogance comes racism.
In practice, mental health assessments usually fail to allow for ideologies
about life, approaches to life's problems, beliefs and feelings that come from
non-western cultures. The black experience in society is not given credence,
even if the existence of personal discrimination is recognised in a
theoretical sort of way. The alienation felt by most black people is usually
seen as their problem (and this often leads to ‘treatment’ aimed at
getting people to recognise 'reality') rather than a problem for society as a
whole. In such a context, stereotypical assumptions about black people
influence assessments that professionals make. Way back in 1993, the report of
the inquiry into deaths of three black youngsters in Broadmoor Hospital (SHSA,
1993) called for research into the problem created by the stereotype ‘big,
black and dangerous’, but all that happened was that the hospital started
cultural events with West Indian food etc. largely attended mainly by white
people (for the food).
I
have not got the time to pursue issues around diagnosis but I suggest that
among the factors that influence diagnosis are the images that diagnoses carry
and the images that people making diagnosis carry in their heads, often
unwittingly. Thus, alienness is linked to schizophrenia (as a diagnosis) and
to biological and / or cultural inferiority (as a judgment that is often
implicit, rather than explicit). Race comes into both these concepts -
alienness and inferiority. And then, what often happens in practice is that we
make diagnoses because we want to treat - and the difference between treatment
and control are seldom very clear, especially when we are faced with people we
do not understand or are frightened of.
Again,
consider what happens when psychiatry is called upon to assess dangerousness
in relation to mental illness. We have really very little to go on and so we
turn to common sense images of dangerous people as a guide - and where do we
get our common sense from? And racist images are implicated in the images
underpinning both concepts. Just as some nineteenth century American
psychiatrists saw run away slaves as drapetomanic, it is not difficult for us
to see such angry, undesirable, ‘aliens’ as ‘schizophrenic’ or
‘psychotic’ - and that is how racism operates.
Of
course when major tranquillisers keep people so diagnosed quiet and
subservient, a self-fulfilling prophecy confirms our ‘clinical acumen’ -
or should I say ‘use of power’.
Conclusions
This
talk has dwelt on what I know most closely, namely the mental health system,
in particular the practice of psychiatry and the nature of so-called ‘ethnic
issues’. I hope my presentation helps in understanding more general issues
of racism and privilege in mental health and psychological practice, and where
we go to if (as the conference title suggests) we go beyond multiculturalism.
I hope I have given you a feel of the complexity of the issues that we all
‘ethnic issues’ in the mental health field. For a professional providing a
service - and many of you may fall into this role in one way or another too -
the need is to get an understanding of what is wrong and then work out how to
put it right. I have no doubt that neither is simple. Words, phrases and
concepts are mere tools for us to use if and when appropriate, and not ends in
themselves. So whether we stick with the concept of multiculturalism, whether
we use ‘institutional racism’ as a concept, these are practical issues –
essentially of whether these words help in understanding and bringing about
changes for the better, to bring about just services or at least less unjust
ways of doing things.
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Imagine Belonging
Carry Gorney
This account of a community arts project with young people who had been adopted was initially presented at the 2004 North West Conference of Narrative Therapy and Community Work in Manchester. It was accompanied by exerpts from the CD-ROM that was produced as a result of the project described. This CD-ROM (Imagine Belonging) is available for a small fee from Carry Gorney who can be contacted on carrygorney@btopenworld.com
Introduction
Imagine Belonging was a project
involving young people children and adults. It was about telling and listening
to stories about adoption. It offered the opportunity for small groups to
share their experiences, to write, to draw, use photos and video to create a
CD ROM.
Imagine Belonging aimed to help others understand what it
is like to ride the roller coaster of adoption and be brave enough to meet the challenge .
Imagine Belonging invited young people and families to
reflect on help they would have liked from the organisers of their lives to
help others in the future.
The CD is the culmination of five months work by six
young people. They also involved another twenty-five children and adults,
through carefully prepared interviews and questionnaires. This second group
contributed further different perspectives on the issues and support needed
around adoption.
The Young People met twice weekly and 2 Saturdays over a three month period. They spent the time talking, making coffee, eating birthday cake, texting each other on their mobiles, sometimes drawing, sometimes writing poems, sometimes elaborately decorating their names with sequins, glitter, feathers and silver pens.
They brought photo albums of the many people in their lives. They shared anecdotes of their early years. They also spent a lot of time eating sandwiches and watching each others videos of when they were small- and cute.
We went to the park and videod each other leaping over
stepping stones, kissing statues, wearing funny hats, running, riding bikes.
We sat on the grass chatting and they listened
attentively to each other's stories and treated their experiences with
respect.
The
concept of Imagine belonging
The title, was based on he project Imagine Chicago, which was a positive investigation of a city by the community. This project was to be a positive investigation of the issues surrounding adoption.
It divided into three sections
· Group work
· Writing, photographing and drawing material
·
Creating the CD
It was based on three elements: