Addressing Trauma, Racism, and Bias in Behavioral Health Service Delivery
African Americans, and other historically marginalized communities, continue to face disproportionate challenges around access to, and quality of behavioral health care owing to systemic racism resulting in significantly poorer mental health outcomes. These organizational and clinical practices, such as who we fund, how we prioritize care access and types of treatments offered are often times impacted by bias. These biases impact quality of care—for example more severe diagnosis without proper assessment for African Americans or undertreatment of pain and increased coercion in care. These care decisions can cause trauma, re-traumatize and add to cumulative historical trauma. This further perpetuates mistrust in systems of care and decreases African Americans and other communities of colors’ mental health supports despite overwhelming need. Reducing trauma and building resiliency requires direct sustained effort to address the systematic racism and bias that lead to poorer mental health outcomes for African Americans and other people of color.
Please join us for this webinar on Wednesday, September 23rd, from 3:00pm – 4:00pm ET as we explore the historic and systematic causes of these behavioral health access disparities, provider biases and provide innovative strategies to address them within your respective programs.