 |
Rahn Kennedy Bailey says African Americans
suffer from mental illness, including clinical depression, at a
considerably higher rate than their Caucasian counterparts. A damaged
mind not only negatively impacts the body but it can potentially
destroy one’s life. Bailey, chairman of psychiatry at
Meharry College in Nashville, Tenn., said there is a direct correlation
between clinical depression/mental illness and major diseases and acute
substance addiction.
“I gave a
talk giving some data, showing the number of African Americans who have
clinical depression and how severe it is, and that is it more severe
than it is in other ethnicities,” Bailey said at the National Medical
Association annual convention in Las Vegas. “We talked about this
co-morbidity between depression and substance abuse problems.”
Bailey
convened with colleagues for a plenary session discussing mental health
disorders. Following, Bailey provided some reasons why African American
suffer psychiatric illness related to brain disorders at inordinately
higher rates. He also outlined some viable solutions to this pervasive
and vastly underrated problem. –terry shropshire
Reasons for Higher Rates of Mental Illness/Clinical Depression:
1. There is more mistrust of the system.
2. We have less access to psychiatric care for African Americans.
3. A greater degree of stigma, which even blocks individuals who have access to care and have the resources to get care.
4. There is a greater tendency when blacks have clinical depression for
it to be worse not to be treated well, have more relapses and less
likely to get to the point of healing.
Solutions:
1. We need greater community information. The individual in our
community may not be aware of the efforts of medication for persons
with clinical depression.
2. We need better community outreach. We need to communicate in a tier
like fashion, in our religious community [and] in our mental health
community within a spirit of communalism. Patients need us to work
together to present a united front.
3. The big issue for me is, we as physicians [must] advocate finding
solutions for health care problems. Brain disorders are health care
problems. You need a physician to provide professional diagnosis and
treatment, just as if it were hypertension, diabetes or asthma.
