Perception is Everything: Stigma, Mental Health, and Suicide in Historically Marginalised Communities

In this course, Victor Armstrong, MSW, North Carolina Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities, and Substance Abuse Services, powerfully illustrates how clinicians’ implicit bias influences providers’ ability to engage in person-centred care. Despite being more likely than white adults to report persistent symptoms of emotional distress, African Americans are less likely to receive guideline-consistent care. Apart from the dearth of African American psychologists and psychiatrists, black people seeking mental health treatment confront the problem that white clinicians do not have the framework to acknowledge and understand the historical context (including slavery, sharecropping, and race-based exclusion from health, educational, social, and economic resources) which causes ongoing trauma and disadvantages African Americans, rendering them underserved, understudied, and misdiagnosed. Armstrong finishes his talk with a compelling side-by-side illustration of several points in American history: as experienced by white people and by black people.