Audubon Ballroon (he/him)@zayzaysmama23 wrote:
When taking a cultural humility training for my job, one thing stuck with me more than any other: Black [People] are disproportionately misdiagnosed with paranoia-related psychiatric conditions, a diagnosis that
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follows you for life. Why? Because when a Black [Person] says something like "I'm afraid to let my teenager walk to his friends house" or "I am terrified of being pulled over by the [pigs] because they might hurt me,"
the (typically white) clinician takes that as a sign the
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patient is paranoid, not that the patient is appropriately aware of actual dangers around them and is having very real fears about a very likely and common scenario. The clinician takes the patient's statement and tries to fit it into the clinician's world view and
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life experiences, instead of asking the patient about *their* worldview and experiences.
The training also said that instead of clinicians getting offended when a Black [Person] switches providers or requests a Black provider, clinicians should examine where their own biases,
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worldviews, and life experience make them mismatched for certain patients. The only way for a clinician to truly even begin to understand a Black [Person]'s experiences is for them to engage with Black [People] in a peer environment and stop centering themself and their privilege.
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@communitymentalhealthworker replied:
Genuinely I can only assume these clinicians are middle to upper class (and white) because working at a CMHC you find out really quick that plenty of poor white clients have legitimate fear of [pigs] too---obviously it's
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worse by an order of magnitude for poor [Black People]. Like the amount of not-listening you have to do in order to label it as paranoia is...enormous.
@zayzaysmama23 :
I agree. I think that's what made this part of the training stand out so much: there are
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enough clinicians out there diagnosing Black [People] as paranoid (specifically with OCD, paranoid-schizophrenic, etc) that someone actually did a study on what the notes in the patients' charts said and what the diagnostic criteria used was and came to the conclusion that Black [People] were being diagnosed as paranoid when they were seeking support for anxiety related to actual real life threats.
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