Black mental health patients hit hard by COVID-19, social injustice: ‘We were already at a breaking point’
Chicago TribuneJul 13, 2020
Dr.
Health disparities were prevalent in the Black community before COVID-19. Life expectancy for residents on the
Suicide attempts that were self-reported by Black teens have spiked since 1991, even as their peers in other groups have experienced a downward trend or remained unchanged, according to a study by the
Now with COVID-19 hitting Black communities extra hard and the added stressor of social injustice (
“I know there’s resilience in the Black community, but this is something new for us,” she said. “We were already at a breaking point, but the recent police violence is just an extra reminder of what we always knew to be present and has never gone away. That’s hit me really hard.”
Jackson, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Rush who teaches health equity and social justice, and is director of Rush’s community psychiatry fellowship, spends half of her week at the hospital and the other half at
Dr.
“I think, in
The workload has led Jackson to take up cooking as a hobby, to maintain her own mental health. She said she’s cried more than ever before, seeing her people decimated by the pandemic and what she considers a lack of the proper response from the larger medical community.
Jackson said the Trump administration was pressuring states to reopen after statistics showed that minorities were disproportionately affected by the coronavirus.
“The feeling is: ‘They know that it’s us who are dying, and they’re going to start reopening.‘” she said. “I don’t have a counterargument for that ... treating some lives as disposable and treating the economy as more important.”
According to Jackson, now is the time for mental health to become more mainstream -- a change in policies with real money backing those policies could bring real change in mental health strategy that encompasses the most vulnerable.
“The fact is racism was baked into systems and policies, so I think that which has been done intentionally must be undone intentionally at the right level of policy,” Jackson said. “This is basic 101 critical race theory: how to dismantle health inequities.”
Jackson and her twin sister, Dr.
“There’s a rich literature showing that Black patients who come for mental health services cannot receive the same level of care as nonminority groups,” Jackson said. “In a nutshell, African Americans who come in complaining of textbook symptoms of mood disorders are less likely to get that diagnosis when they walk out. If they’re lucky to get any diagnosis, they get some kind of minor treatment. If not, they get sent home and told to go to church.
“There’s also a higher incidence of Black people getting diagnosed with things like schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, and they’ll get these diagnoses that almost have a violent undertone to them. If you take that as the state of affairs before COVID-19 and you put them in a system that doesn’t even see them and diagnose them properly, it’s a recipe of injustice and a recipe for disaster. To me, it all ties together -- the police brutality, all this stuff -- because the nut of it is you have all these people that are treated as less than human, and that changes the way you diagnose them; it changes the medicines that you choose for them.”
Ajilore said one way to prioritize mental health and improve accessibility is through telemedicine. He’s been a proponent, even before the pandemic hit. And now that some boundaries have been relaxed, he’s advising patients to use it. (At least one local endeavor has been put in place with Call 4 Calm, a free emotional support text line that lets you speak to a mental health professional during these uncertain times. There’s also a
“Telepsychiatry is an approach to bridging that gap,” he said. “I know of a company based in
“People will go to the doctor, take medication for diabetes or high blood pressure or cholesterol, but as soon as you start talking about mental health, you’re crazy,” she said. “But we should not be separating our mental health from our physical health. It’s all a part of our health.”
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