Welcome
This research guide is a compilation of resources designed to support the Social Justice and Health Equity curriculum at Yale.
Director: Carmen Black, MD
Co-Director: Jessica Isom, MD, MPH
Readings
Woke by
As a millennial icon on the forefront of online activism, Titania is uniquely placed to guide her readers through the often bewildering array of terminology and concepts that constitute twenty-first-century 'wokeness'. These new ideas often leave the general public bemused, particularly if they don't read the Guardian. Being woke is actually much easier than people think. As Titania demonstrates, anyone can be an activist. By simply adding a rainbow flag to your Facebook profile, or calling out an elderly person who doesn't understand what 'non-binary' means, you can change the world for the better. Indeed, social media has now made it possible to show how virtuous you are without having to do anything at all. Timely and indispensable, Titania's step-by-step guide will help you to become the woke person you need to be in an increasingly progressive world. In a non-patronising manner, Titania will explain why you are wrong about everything and how to become more like her.
Call Number: MEDICAL, Course Reserve HM671 .M385 2019ISBN: 9781472130846Publication Date: 2019-09-03
- Equal Treatment
a medical education non-profit based on the belief that all people deserve access to equal, unbiased care, and equal health outcomes. - Institute for Healing & Justice in Medicine
an interdisciplinary hub - a community, a research epicenter, and a dialogue space.
Citizenship and Mental Health by
More than 50 years ago, President Kennedy gave an address to Congress that launched the community mental health movement in the U.S. This movement involved a vast and complex effort to replace the wholesale institutionalization of people with serious mental illnesses with community mental health centers, public education on mental illness, and prevention efforts. The mission and main thrust of this new movement, however, were quite simple: we would provide effective mental health treatment to people in their home communities and provide the conditions for them to have 'a life in the community.' Starting in the 1990s with Jim, a person who was homeless and initially refused help from outreach workers, Citizenship & Mental Health tells a 20-year story of practice, theory, and research to support the full participation of persons with mental illnesses who, in many cases, have also been homeless, have criminal charges in their past, and are poor. As the first of its kind, this book addresses the concept of citizenship as an applied theory for fulfilling the promise of the community mental health center movement. Citizenship is defined as a strong connection to the 5 R's of rights, responsibilities, roles, resources, and relationships that society offers to its members, and a sense of belonging that comes from others' recognition of one's valued membership in society. The citizenship model supports the strengths, hopes, and aspirations of people with mental illnesses to become neighbors, community members, and citizens.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9780199355389Publication Date: 2015
Confronting Racism by
This book proposes a comprehensive approach to confronting racism through a foundational framework as well as practical strategies to correct and reverse the course of the past and catalyze the stalled efforts of the present. It will do so by focusing on those specific aspects of law and legal theory that intersect with psychological research and practice. In Part I, the historical and current underpinnings of racial injustice and the obstacles to combating racism are introduced. Part II examines the documented psychological and emotional effects of racism, including race-based traumatic stress. In Part III, the authors analyze the application of forensic mental health assessment in addressing race-related experiences and present a legal and policy framework for reforming institutional and organizational policies. Finally, in part IV the authors advocate for a close, collaborative approach among legal and mental health professionals and their clients to seek redress for racial discrimination. Confronting Racism provides a framework for legal, mental health, and other related social science professionals and leaders to acknowledge and act on the harmful aspects of our societal systems.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9781315148564Publication Date: 2019
The New Jim Crow by
Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action." Called "stunning" by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis, "invaluable" by the Daily Kos, "explosive" by Kirkus, and "profoundly necessary" by the Miami Herald, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, now with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9781595588197Publication Date: 2012
A Psychiatrist's Guide to Advocacy by
Overcoming fear, ambivalence, and inertia to act on behalf of self or others can be difficult even for mental health clinicians who are accustomed to helping patients overcome challenges. A Psychiatrist's Guide to Advocacy explores the diverse definitions of advocacy and helps to identify methods and opportunities for advocacy by mental health practitioners. The editors argue for a greater culture of advocacy among psychiatrists in order to effect broad and lasting systemic and structural change. A noteworthy example is the push for insurance coverage parity between mental health and other medical care. However, legislative advocacy is just one of the many types explored in the book; advocacy takes many forms, including patient-level advocacy, organizational advocacy, education and research as advocacy, and media-targeted advocacy. Also addressed are specific issues of advocacy for special populations, including children and families, older adults, LGBTQ patients, and veterans. Taken together, these chapters represent a practical toolkit for mental health advocacy in its myriad forms. In prose both compelling and accessible, the volume * Identifies five of the most pressing systemic problems in mental health care (lack of access to quality payer-covered, evidence-based mental health care; the psychiatry workforce shortage; lack of parity for mental health care compared with other forms of health care; the stigma against both consumers and providers of treatment for mental disorders, including substance use disorders; and high rates of physician burnout) and explains how advocacy at different levels can address these issues. * Describes the essential factors needed for effective advocacy, with emphasis on pathways to mentorship, providing examples of what integrating advocacy into the psychiatrist's career path looks like and identifying strategies to encourage lifelong advocacy* Delineates the advocacy needs of diverse patient populations, including children, families, and older adults; LGBTQ, non-native, and substance-using patients; veterans and military service members; and more* Includes four substantive interviews with advocacy role models who embody and embrace the advocate's mission, expressed in actions and on platforms that are diverse and illustrative* Includes learning objectives that tell readers what they can expect to master by the end of each chapter, allowing for focused reading and easy review A Psychiatrist's Guide to Advocacy is a call for action and a blueprint for change, providing clinicians with the foundation for recognizing their opportunities and embracing their roles as advocates.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9781615372331Publication Date: 2020
Race after Technology by
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the "New Jim Code," she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide here.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 1509526439Publication Date: 2019
- Medical Student Activism: Political x Institutional x Personal | by Robert Rock and Nientara Anderson
This article was published in Somatosphere - "a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics" and is part of the series: "Critical Histories, Activist Futures".
- An anthropology of biomedicine by Margaret M. Locke and Vinh-Kim Nguyen (e-book)
- Asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates by Erving Goffman (e-book) (*available online temporarily through HathiTrust)
- Between the world and me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (e-book)
- Black man in a white coat: a doctor's reflections on race and medicine by Damon Tweedy, M.D. (e-book)
- Black skin, white masks by Frantz Fanon (e-book)
- Captivating technology: race, carceral technoscience, and liberatory imagination in everyday life by Ruha Benjamin (e-book)
- Citizen: an American lyric by Claudia Rankine (Print)
- Dear America: notes of an undocumented citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas (Print)
- Disparities in psychiatric care: clinical and cross-cultural perspectives by Anelle Pedro Ruiz (e-book)
- Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement by Angela Davis (e-book)
- A grammar of power in psychotherapy: exploring the dynamics of privilege by Malin Fors (e-book)
- High Price: a neuroscientist's journey of self-discovery that challenges everything you know about drugs and society by Carl Hart (Print)
- How to be an antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (e-book)
- Levels of racism: a theoretic framework and a gardener’s tale by Camara Jones (article)
- Pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire (e-book)
- The psychology of black boys and adolescents by Kirkland C. Vaughans and Warren Spielberg (e-book)
- The question of Palestine by Edward W. Said (Print)
- Racism and psychiatry: contemporary issues and interventions (e-book)
- Rethinking psychiatry: from cultural category to personal experience by Arthur Kleinman (e) (*available online temporarily through HathiTrust)
- The souls of black folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (e-book)
- Strangers from a different shore: a history of Asian Americans by Ronald Takaki (Print)
- Under the strain of color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the promise of an antiracist psychiatry by Gabriel N. Mendes (e-book)
- Wretched of the earth by Frantz Fanon (Print)
- Writings for a liberation psychology by Ignacio Martin-Baro (Print)
Administrations of Lunacy by
Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology: the state mental asylum system in which psychiatry was born and whose influences extend into America's troubled present.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9781620972977Publication Date: 2020
Anatomy of an Epidemic by
In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation's children. What is going on? Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix l "chemical imbalances" in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled-and dismayed-to discover what was reported in the scientific journals. Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long-term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness? This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit? By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies-all of which point to the same startling conclusion-been kept from the public? In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9780307452412Publication Date: 2010
Body and Soul by
The legacy of the Black Panther PartyOCOs commitment to community health care, a central aspect of its fight for social justice
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9780816678754Publication Date: 2011
Fatal Invention by
An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era. Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes. This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological concept--revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases--continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and "provocative analysis" (Nature) of race, science, and politics that "is consistently lucid . . . alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). "Everyone concerned about social justice in America should read this powerful book." --Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union "A terribly important book on how the 'fatal invention' has terrifying effects in the post-genomic, 'post-racial' era." --Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology, Duke University, and author of Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States "Fatal Invention is a triumph! Race has always been an ill-defined amalgam of medical and cultural bias, thinly overlaid with the trappings of contemporary scientific thought. And no one has peeled back the layers of assumption and deception as lucidly as Dorothy Roberts." --Harriet A. Washington, author of and Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9781595586919Publication Date: 2011
The History of White People by
Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of "whiteness" for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of "race" is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9780393079494Publication Date: 2011
Mad in America by
In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker reveals an astounding truth: Schizophrenics in the United States fare worse than those in poor countries, and quite possibly worse than asylum patients did in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, Whitaker argues, modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles and we as a society are deluded about their efficacy. Tracing over three centuries of "cures" for madness, Whitaker shows how medical therapies-from "spinning" or "chilling" patients in colonial times to more modern methods of electroshock, lobotomy, and drugs-have been used to silence patients and dull their minds, deepening their suffering and impairing their hope of recovery. Based on exhaustive research culled from old patient medical records, historical accounts, and government documents, this haunting book raises important questions about our obligations to the mad, what it means to be "insane," and what we value most about the human mind.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9780786723799Publication Date: 2001
Medical Apartheid by
From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America's shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge-a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government's notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused black Americans to view researchers-and indeed the whole medical establishment-with such deep distrust. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read Medical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9780767915472Publication Date: 2008
The Myth of Mental Illness by
Now available in a Harper Colophon edition, this classic book has revolutionized thinking throughout the Western world about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices. Book jacket.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 0060141964Publication Date: 1974
The Protest Psychosis by
Revolution was in the air in the 1960s. Civil rights protests demanded attention on the airwaves and in the streets. Anger gave way to revolt, and revolt provided the elusive promise of actual change. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. Here, far from the national glare of sit-ins, boycotts, or riots, African American men suddenly appeared in the asylum’s previously white, locked wards. Some of these men came to the attention of the state after participating in civil rights demonstrations, while others were sent by the military, the penal system, or the police. Though many of the men hailed from Detroit, ambulances and paddy wagons brought men from other urban centers as well. Once at Ionia, psychiatrists classified these men under a single diagnosis: schizophrenia.InThe Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American men at the Ionia State Hospital, and how events at Ionia mirrored national conversations that increasingly linked blackness, madness, and civil rights. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents—from scientific literature, to music lyrics, to riveting, tragic hospital charts—Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the 1960s and 1970s in ways that directly reflected national political events. As he demonstrates, far from resulting from the racist intentions of individual doctors or the symptoms of specific patients, racialized schizophrenia grew from a much wider set of cultural shifts that defined the thoughts, actions, and even the politics of black men as being inherently insane.Ultimately,The Protest Psychosisprovides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions, even during our current, seemingly post-race era of genetics, pharmacokinetics, and brain scans.
Call Number: Online bookISBN: 9780807085929Publication Date: 2010
Books
- The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America by Richard Rothstein (e)
- Educating health professionals to address the social determinants of mental health The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine (e)
- Root shock: how tearing up city neighborhoods hurts America, and what we can do about it by Mindy Thompson Fullilove (e)
- The social determinants of mental health by Michael T. Compton, MD, MPH and Ruth S. Shim, MD, MPH (e)
- Urban alchemy: restoring joy in America's sorted-out cities by Mindy Thompson Fullilove (e)
Articles
- Bromage, B., Encandela, J. A., Cranford, M., Diaz, E., Williamson, B., Spell, V. T., & Rohrbaugh, R. M. (2019). Understanding Health Disparities Through the Eyes of Community Members: a Structural Competency Education Intervention. Acad Psychiatry, 43(2), 244-247. doi: 10.1007/s40596-018-0937-z
- Hansen, H., Braslow, J., & Rohrbaugh, R. M. (2018). From Cultural to Structural Competency-Training Psychiatry Residents to Act on Social Determinants of Health and Institutional Racism. JAMA Psychiatry, 75(2), 117-118. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.3894
- Jordan, A., Mathis, M. L., & Isom, J. (2020). Achieving Mental Health Equity: Addictions. Psychiatr Clin North Am, 43(3), 487-500. doi: 10.1016/j.psc.2020.05.007
- Londono Tobon, A., Budde, K. S., & Rohrbaugh, R. M. (2019). A Novel Approach to Fostering Diversity in Graduate Medical Education: Chief Residents for Diversity and Inclusion. Acad Psychiatry, 43(3), 344-345. doi: 10.1007/s40596-019-01055-5
- Mathis, W., Cyrus, K., Jordan, A., & Rohrbaugh, R. (2019). Introducing a Structural Competency Framework for Psychiatry Residents: Drawing Your Neighborhood. Acad Psychiatry, 43(6), 635-638. doi: 10.1007/s40596-019-01077-z
- Metzl, J. M., & Hansen, H. (2014). Structural competency: theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality. Soc Sci Med, 103, 126-133. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.06.032
- Williams, J. C., & Rohrbaugh, R. M. (2019). Confronting Racial Violence: Resident, Unit, and Institutional Responses. Academic Medicine, 94(8), 1084-1088. doi: 10.1097/acm.0000000000002610
Book Chapter
- Allying with Our Neighbors to Teach Structural Competence: The Yale Department of Psychiatry Structural Competency Community Initiative. by Robert M. Rohrbaugh, Billy Bromage, John A. Encandela, Virginia T. Spell, Bridgett Williamson, Walter S. Mathis. In: Structural Competency in Mental Health and Medicine, ed: Helena Hansen and Jonathan Metzl, Springer, 2019
Other
Lectures
- How racism makes us sick | David R. Williams [TED Talk on the health effects of racism on aging]
- On our own: patient-controlled alternatives to the mental health system by Judi Chamberlin.
- The problem with race-based medicine by Dorothy Roberts
Podcasts
- Addy Hour with Dr. Nii Addy - Conversations at the intersection of brain science, mental health, faith, culture, & social justice
- Flip the Script – by MD Candidate at the Yale School of Medicine
- Intersectionality Matters! hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw
- The Praxis: Connecting theory and practice for health justice
- Throughline from NPR
- Vote for Biden, but don’t lie about who he really is - featuring Dr. Cornel West from Michael Moore
Journals
- Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities
- Harvard Journal on Racial & Ethnic Justice
- Race and Medicine Collection New England Journal of Medicine
- Achieving Mental Health Equity Psychiatric Clinics of North America 2020 [Special issue]
Books
- Reproducing race: an ethnography of pregnancy as a site of racialization by Khiara Bridges (e)
- Breathing race into the machine: the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics by Lundy Braun (e)
- Medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference by Anne Pollock (e)
Resource Guide
- Race and Racism in Health Care (Yale) This page brings together resources for the Medical Center community for the purpose of educating and raising awareness on this important topic.
