Topic:  Race and Mental Health

This course will extend the student’s knowledge in the specialty
area of race and mental health.  In general, we will explore the
social facets of health and disease, the social behavior of health
personnel and those people who are consumers of health care.  We
will pay particular attention to the social contexts of health and
illness (with a consideration of international patterns of health
and illness).  Some of the areas covered include social disparities
in health, the experience of illness, and the environment and health.

We will begin by questioning the notion of race as a social
category.  After reviewing the history of the concept of race, we
turn to the problem of conceptualizing mental health.  These two
areas of research are brought together in a consideration of the
ways in which insanity has been handled in African American client
populations.  In this section, we more clearly articulate the
concept of “racial health.”

The next section of the class concentrates on theoretical models
used to examine the relationship between race and mental health.
The models that have received the most attention are: social role
and social stress.  The emerging cultural and life course approaches
will also be discussed in some detail.  Although we review these
theoretical/empirical models, the questions we address here are: Are
these models applicable to nonwhites?  If not, what models should we
be using to better understand minority mental health?  Thus, we end
this section with a consideration of the growing body of work that
adopts an ecological approach to the study of health and illness in
society and work by medical anthropologist on ethno-medicine.

We then move on to the social patterns of health and illness in
society.  Besides a consideration of race/ethnicity, we will focus
on the intersection of gender and class in further elucidating these
patterns.  This body of research is well-established but it
continues to suffer from certain biases.  We explore the biases in
tests/evaluation of clients, clinical diagnoses, decision-making
processes, and prescribing practices.  This literature is buttressed
by work on the history of minorities in medicine.

We conclude the class with a review of the literature on utilization
patterns.  Students are challenged to develop a strategy that will
decrease the growing health disparity between minorities and Whites--
-speaking especially to those strategies that may or may not work
well for certain groups: children, adolescents, young adults, middle-
aged adults, older adults.