THE NATION'S LARGEST AFRICAN AMERICAN ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVE
May 18, 2018 - Vol. 1, Issue 33
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PricewaterhouseCoopers Charitable Foundation Grant
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We are done! This week,
Charlotte Coker Gibson
and
Alpana Mittal
visited our offices in Chicago to celebrate our successful completion of adding
2,000
interviews to
The HistoryMakers
Digital Archive. We had a great gathering with staff, our transcription team, and our segmenting team – all sharing stories and things learned from working in the archives. As of now,
The HistoryMakers
Digital Archive has been licensed by
39
colleges and universities, and the following have been recently added – New York University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Library, the Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and New York's Schomburg Library.
Thank you PwC!!
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Mental Health and the Black Community
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Campaign image by the National Alliance of Mental Illness.
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The perceptions of psychological treatment in the black community are multifaceted. Beyond stigma, negative attitudes are reinforced by the history of mental and social healthcare, as most psychology theories were developed for and by middle-class white men. Jacqueline R. Smith, Ed.D., underscored this reality in her analysis of mental health care services for African Americans when she wrote that definitions of mental illness “ignored the influence of sociopolitical oppression, discrimination, and systematic disempowerment which describes the life experience of many racial and ethnic minority groups in America.”
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The available literature suggests that African Americans have higher rates of psychiatric disorders, such as PTSD and depression, and are less likely to utilize outpatient mental health services.
3
, 4
According to a 2013 demographic study by the American Psychological Association (APA) Center for Workforce Studies, whites accounted for 83.6 percent of active psychologists, as opposed to 5.3 percent for African Americans.
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While associations like the APA have attempted to prioritize ethnic disparities in mental health care, these statistics are alarming--especially when considering the widespread preference for racial-ethnic matching of therapists and clients.
6
Dr. Carl Bell
served as the director of the Community Mental Health Council in Chicago, one of the country’s largest community mental health centers. He explained,
“I think it’s hard for people around issues of racism and race…The difficulty that black people have is that they can’t tell the decent white person who accepts black people from the toxic white person who tolerates black people. How do you tell? You don’t know who’s who.”
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[Dr. Carl Bell, THMDA 1.6.2]
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Psychiatrist
Dr. Annelle B. Primm
spoke extensively about the stigma of mental illness in the black community, including the barriers to treatment: “
Being an African American in this society where we are already devalued as people, to take on another stigmatizing label of having a mental illness…it’s sort of a double whammy
.”
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[Dr. Annelle B. Primm, THMDA 2.3.7]
.
Acknowledging the reliance on spirituality and faith for treatment,
9
she emphasized the benefits of collaboration between mental health professionals and religious leaders.
10
From the perspective of Dr. Primm, who created the nation's first urban support program for those with severe mental illness in 1985,
public attention to
mental health in the African American community remains an imperative today.
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For our subscribing institutions, check out our curated playlist of stories that accompanies the above feature. To do so, copy and paste the below URL to the tail end of your university’s specific URL for The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. For example: [Your Institution URL] + [Playlist Tail]
Playlist Tail:
/stories/6;IDList=635048,598998,85787,38945,508238,138991,9415,638390,638385,203357,203355,203354;ListTitle=Mental%20Health%20and%20the%20Black%20Community
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This Month at The HistoryMakers
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The HistoryMakers is currently working with the institutional leadership of The Ohio State University and the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, who are our prospective subscribers to The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Following the finalization of their agreements, the total number of subscribing institutions will increase to
39
.
As always, we are incredibly grateful to all who have made the realization of the digital archive possible. Without the support of our subscribing institutions, the strides we made thus far would not have been achievable!
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Please share with us your stories of how you incorporate The HistoryMakers Digital Archive into your curriculum and research. We'd love to hear from you!
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Stay tuned for more content on The HistoryMakers Digital Archive in early June, when we resume publication of new interviews.
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1. IMAGE: Cure Stigma campaign image by the National Alliance of Mental Illness. Accessed May 17, 2018. https://www.curestigma.org/themes/curestigma/images/twitter-card-image.jpg.
2. Jacqueline R. Smith, “Mental Health Care Services for African Americans: Parity or Disparity?”
Journal of Pan African Studies
7, no. 9 (2015):55-63.
3. Elizabeth Okunrounmu, Argie Allen-Wilson, Maureen Davey, and Adam Davey, “Black Church Leaders’ Attitudes about Seeking Mental Health Services: Role of Religiosity and Spirituality,”
International Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Society
6, no. 4 (2016): 45-55.
4. Akihiko Masuda, Page L. Anderson, and Joshua Edmonds, “Help-Seeking Attitudes, Mental Health Stigma, and Self-Concealment Among African American College Students,”
Journal of Black Studies
43, no. 7 (2012): 773-786.
6. Smith, p. 59.
7. Dr. Carl Bell (The HistoryMakers A2008.117), interviewed by Larry Crowe, November 3, 2008, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 6, story 2, Dr. Carl Bell talks about racial discrimination in healthcare.
8. Dr. Annelle B. Primm (The HistoryMakers A2004.109), interviewed by Racine Tucker Hamilton, September 22, 2004, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 2, tape 3, story 7, Dr. Annelle B. Primm reflects on the stigma around mental illness in the African American community.
9. Okunrounmu et al, p. 45.
10. Dr. Annelle B. Primm (The HistoryMakers A2004.109), interviewed by Racine Tucker Hamilton, September 22, 2004, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 2, tape 3, story 9, Dr. Annelle B. Primm talks about how collaboration between the religious and mental health communities can improve the quality of mental health services.
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Spot an error in
The HistoryMakers Digital Archive
? We want to fix it! Send a brief description of the error to:
digitalarchive@thehistorymakers.org
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We're here to help! Please direct questions about
The HistoryMakers Digital Archive
to:
digitalarchive@thehistorymakers.org
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Browse our collection at:
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