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In the session, “Depression and other Mental Health Disorders in African Americans: Diagnostic and Treatment Changes” at the 2009 NMA Convention and Scientific Assembly in Las Vegas, Westley Clark said no real health care reform can take place without addressing mental health. “Health care reform needs to deal with health care disparities,” says Clark, the director of the Center for Substance Abuse and Treatment in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Physicians need to look at the most cost-effective way to provide effective health care so we can move toward universal health care and bring effective drug and alcohol treatment to all communities.”
“Depression is more chronic and disabling in blacks than among whites. However, most people, regardless of race or ethnicity, who have access to depression treatment, have received inadequate care. Inadequate care remains a challenge in our nation,” says Anelle B. Primm, director of Minority and National Affairs at the American Psychiatric Association in Arlington, Va.
It is imperative that African Americans overcome the shame associated with having mental health diseases such as chronic depression, says Rahn K. Bailey of MeHarry College in Nashville, Tenn. “We need to end the stigma of mental illness as the big bad wolf … it’s basically a chronic, prevailing theme that argues something is wrong if we acknowledge mental illness.”
Bailey forcefully challenged his colleagues in the medical profession to address this dilemma. “There is something wrong with us, as mental health professionals, if we can’t make the argument that clinical depression is a chronic mental illness that we can diagnose and treat adequately and optimally in a culturally competent way and with an effective and multi-modal, broad-based approach,” he says. –terry shropshire
