Tackling the Black Mental Health “Crisis” from Within

Black Britons are disprivileged in mental health care in the 70th anniversary of Britain’s National Health Service. The author asks why and points out how to resolve the crisis.

By Thomas L Blair

The author and what the book is about

Prof Thomas L Blair BA, MA PhD publishes the Editions Blair series and edits his pioneering Black Experience web sites archived in the Social Welfare Portal of the British Library https://www.bl.uk/social- welfare/search?q=editions+blair&catalogue=sitecore His eBook argues for a culture and community-centred approach to the Black Mental Health Care “Crisis”. He details the positive influences of historical Black psychiatrists: Lambo and Fanon, contemporary clinicians, psychologists and mental care workers Aggrey Burke, Bushell and Blackman. Nine principles and crisis-changing strategies are identified. These include: 1. Recognise that the Black Mental Health Care “crisis” is more than just a funding problem. Its roots are in the biased distribution of mental health services. Made worse by people-destructive priorities in the economy and society. The solution must include community-led self-study and mutual aid. 2. Learn from communities building productive cultures of health and well-being, especially in the Black diaspora homelands, in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. 3. Create your Knowledge Base with culture-appropriate local surveys, observations and experiences. 4. Lead in training local mental health clinicians to deliver the evidence for prevention, treatment, and health promotion. 5. Launch Fair Media guides for journalists to encourage balanced reporting. 6. Ensure that mental illness, in individuals and groups, is covered by insurance at parity with other illnesses. 7. Support a community-led agenda with the assistance of key agencies, administrations and organisations, and scientists, clinicians, psychiatrists and anti-stigma campaigns. 8. Promote voluntary philanthropy for Black Mental Health Care among wealthy Black celebrities and the better-off classes. 9. Organise legal and medical defence groups to champion the rights of Black people with and prone to mental illnesses.

Publication details

Tackling the Black Mental Health “Crisis” from Within Thomas L Blair 978-1-908480-64-4 Published by Editions Blair e-Books 2017© No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both copyright owner and the publisher of this book. The greatest care has been taken in compiling this book. However, no responsibility can be accepted by the author and publishers or compilers for the accuracy of the information presented. Opinions expressed do not necessarily coincide with the editorial views of author or copyright holder Edition Blair. Editions Blair has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Every effort has been made to reach copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased to hear from anyone whose rights have been unwittingly infringed.

Black Mental Health Care In Crisis, Activists Warn

Nine “Why-to” and “How-to” Ways to Build Cultures of Health and Well-being

By Thomas L Blair, 11 November 2017© rev 13 Nov

The 70th anniversary of Britain’s National Health Service is poised to be the toughest financial year for Black mental health services.

In response, local councillor Jacqui Dyer MBE shown here and political activist Patrick Vernon. They are campaigning for Black Thrive, a partnership for Black Well-being in Lambeth, the London borough with a Black mayor, Cllr Marcia Cameron.

Dyer warns this is “precisely the time to dig seriously deep for money, because the impact of austerity is creating even more mental illness as people struggle to survive”. African and Caribbean residents are over-represented and least served in the mental health services. A fact “ignored for far too long”, in Lambeth still reeling from the death in police custody of Black psychiatric patient Sean Riggs.

The horrific statistics spurred Dyer’s good intentions. For example: “Lambeth has the highest rate of psychiatric detention under the Mental Health Act in England”, according to the Black Mental Health Commission, and two-thirds are of Black African and Caribbean background.

Given the scale and depth of the crisis, the plain truth is that mentally ill Black people are short-changed by the system. They are more likely to be subject to sectioning and medication. They often suffer lethal physical restraint, agonising death or incarceration. And, campaigners say there is little support after they are released.

No wonder communities and stricken individuals are reluctant to engage with services, and are so much more ill when they do. Hence, the rise in human wreckage will reach disastrous levels every year that help and hope are denied.

Nine principles and strategies for change

Humbling pleas of inequality and under–funding of Black Mental Health Care (BMHC) will not work in these tight budget years. Therefore, activists must pledge to create their own development plan and raise the social capital to fund it. Here are nine principles and strategies to achieve this.

1. Recognise that the Black Mental Health Care “crisis” is more than just a funding problem. Its roots are in the biased distribution of mental health services. Made worse by people-destructive priorities in the economy and society. The solution must include community-led self-study and mutual aid with the support of Lambeth’s mayor Cllr Marcia Cameron. 2. Learn from communities building productive cultures of health and well- being, especially in the Black diaspora homelands, in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. 3. Create your Knowledge Base with culture-appropriate local surveys, observations and experiences. 4. Lead in training local mental health clinicians to deliver the evidence for prevention, treatment, and health promotion. 5. Launch Fair Media guides for journalists to encourage balanced reporting. 6. Ensure that mental illness, in individuals and groups, is covered by insurance at parity with other illnesses. 7. Support a community-led agenda with the assistance of key agencies, administrations and organisations, and scientists, clinicians, psychiatrists and anti-stigma campaigns. 8. Promote voluntary philanthropy for Black Mental Health Care among wealthy Black celebrities and the better-off classes. 9. Organise legal and medical defence groups to champion the rights of Black people with and prone to mental illnesses. As you can see, this Chrononicleworld approach encourages self-reliance, not moralisms, hollow rhetoric and pleading. Rather, it complements righteous anger with positive programs worked out in their minute particulars. This is precisely the forward thinking that is required.

NOTE: For further information: Get Connected , browse the web read the Chronicleworld article on the problems and solutions to deaths in custody. Serious comments and debate are welcome.- For your information: The Mayor of Lambeth Councillor Marcia Cameron (2017/2018) Councillor Cameron was inaugurated as the Mayor of Lambeth on Wednesday 19 April 2017 at the Annual Meeting of the Council. Cameron said ‘I am extremely proud to have been given this opportunity, to represent the people of Lambeth in the borough that I was born in and grew up in and I am looking forward to meeting residents, local groups, organisations and businesses during my term of office’. Councillor Cameron has been a councillor for Tulse Hill Ward since 2006.

Keywords and topics: Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Europe, Afro-Latin Americans, Crisis of Black urbanism, Homelands, Media and online journalism, Networking Homelands of Black Britons, African Diaspora, Black advancement, Black Reconstruction, Introduction .'Black British culture is in crisis' says leading scholar, State of Black Britain, Why aren't Black deaths in custody an election issue?”

AFIYA — Nothing Black is Alien to Us A 5-step Crisis-busting Program for Black psychiatrists

By Thomas L Blair 25 November 2017 ©

As the degradation of the Black mentally ill and the collapse of community solidarity unfold, Dr Aggrey W Burke, shown here, and many other Black psychiatrists make a clear and valid point.

Black psychiatrists and health workers are better equipped to address the Black mental health and care crisis than the followers of the Viennese polymath, Sigmund Freud.

Increasingly and convincingly, more than a half century of evidence supports this view. African and Afro-Caribbean psychiatrists and medical scientists have contributed to mental health knowledge and practice. Collectively, they reject the false equation that Eurocentric “normal” is good for everyone. Each sought to apply the healing qualities of the Black experiences.

“It takes a village” – Communal effort has a role in treating mental illness It is a little known fact that Thomas Adeoye Lambo was the first Black trained psychiatrist in the UK. As a hospital administrator in colonial Nigeria, he created the Aro Village system of community psychiatry in 1954.

Radically, he rejected the cast-off shackles of Bedlam Britain. Instead, he treated patients with a combination of modern curative techniques and traditional resources. Uniquely, Lambo’s Aro was an open village attuned to the harsh realities of a changing society.

Combatting the self-hatred that stifles Black consciousness Working in hospitals in Algeria, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s masterful studies of the impact of French colonial racism are major contributions to psychiatry and politics. The Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean made his revolutionary intentions clear. The coloniser’s dictat that Algerians must be “lactified” (made a carbon copy white) and “culturally French” to be free, was unacceptable.

Fanon saw the dangers and the revolutionary solutions. He said “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.” Therefore, psychiatry should be more than a medical technique; it must “assert that the Arab, who is permanently alienated in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalisation”.

Those who feel it, know it In Britain, psychiatrist and lecturer at St Georges Hospital Dr Aggrey W Burke has exposed the links between deprivation and mental illness in hard-hit Black communities. Furthermore, he uncovers the prejudices that affect Black mental health care. These skills support his work with and for the unheard. Those who are sidelined and silenced in hostile urban environments.

Moreover, born in Jamaica, his patients benefit from his knowledge of prominent icons of West Indian culture. Among them the Jamaican national hero and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, “Black redemption” singer, songwriter and musician Bob Marley, and the Rastafarian movement. They are the guiding light for Black people, he has said. Challenging Local Authorities to Save Our Troubled Children Championing children’s rights was the major contribution of Dr Waveney Bushell, the first educated community psychologist of African Caribbean origin to practice in the UK.

Bushell is best known as a campaigner for Black children erroneously classified as Educationally Sub-Normal (ESN). For 24 years she rescued them from segregated, under-served special schools.

Furthermore, she challenged the prevailing, crudely racist, practices. Local authorities and mental health managers were too quick to expel “unruly” Black school chidren. Too prone to lock schoolchildren into mental hospitals, diagnosed as “emotionally disoriented.”

Moreover, Bushell was a community educator. She introduced teachers and community workers to Bernard Coard’s influential publication ‘How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System’.

Protect, educate and stand up for equality in the health system Black Londoners remember “Rebel” mental health campaigner Peter Scott Blackman. The Afiya (Black well-being) Trust director worked to “reduce racial inequalities in mental health and social care provision”.

Once stricken himself, the recovering Blackman perfected his self-inspired goal in community work. Notably, in the Black Carers Network and through his Steel an’ Skin band of Nigerian and Trinidadian youth.

No stranger to pre-war prejudice, Blackman was one of the few Black children born in Britain before the Windrush generation. He recalls, “he suffered the full gamut of racism, for a time entirely alone”.

Black facts matter Depressingly, there are thousands of people of colour caught up in the mental health system. Isolated, they do not, and cannot, question their culturally deficient treatment. Therefore, they are forced to succumb to it.

Factbox . 51 per cent of patients in a London psychiatric hospital were Black yet less than 17 per cent of the British population are from ethnic minorities . 28 black people per 100,000 of the population end up in secure units compared with four white people per 100,000 . 100 African-Caribbean and African mental health patients were interviewed in a study and almost half had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia . 88 per cent of Black people in a survey said they had been forcibly restrained under the Mental Health Act . Now the threatening crisis starts to brighten The evidence suggests that Black therapists have a positive role to play. Especially psychiatrists and community health workers in the “talking therapies”.

They could actually do a better job of understanding and treating the effects of race inequalities in mental illness.

In addition, of diverse backgrounds themselves, they can speak and heal in all the European coloniser’s languages and dialects.

Black mental health professionals can make a difference These attributes make Black therapists and clinicians more capable than their colleagues. They can make a difference for traumatised Black patients and communities in a five-step program

1. On a theoretical level, their Black knowledge and self-experience are essential contributions to patient treatment. 2. Therapists and clinicians have a Black cultural awareness and competency. 3. They can recognise that “normal behaviour” is a Eurocentric yardstick that must be re-defined. 4. Moreover, they will score high on offering Black patients the best professional practice techniques and analysis of results. 5. This will close the gap between the medical reality of mental health practitioners and the lived reality of their patients.

Expand the pool of Black therapists – The added value is considerable Therefore, I strongly urge a new line of research that will answer the question: Do Black Britons experience better treatment results when paired with clinicians of similar race and background?

Such commanding attributes add value to Black mental health care. However, the qualified implementers must be increased.

Studies report there are only a paltry few, perhaps 50 Black British psychiatrists among the estimated 9,000 members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Pave the way from Black bedlam to betterment The work of Black psychiatrists and others has shone light on one of the most urgent issues. Promoting curing rather than Bedlam-like aggressive containment of Black people. Therefore, prominent Black organisations must work together to protect the rights of the mentally ill. Among them Black Thrive, the Black Mental Health UK and the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network.

Supporting the ongoing patient treatment and recovery efforts of Black professionals is urgent. Forging independent partnerships with local communities is essential. Launching new funds for racial and ethnic diversity in the health system is crucial.

Keywords and tags: Afiya, African and Asian Therapy Network, Aggrey W Burke, Black Thrive, Frantz Fanon, Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, Peter Scott Blackman, the Black Mental Health UK and the Black, Thomas Adeoye Lambo, Waveney Bushell