Families of Color Face Challenges when Seeking Treatment for Mental Illness

Part 1 of 3.

Last summer, Pierre Coriolan was killed by police. He was an innocent black man. This story hit me especially hard because, like my own son, Coriolan struggled with mental illness.

However, there is one crucial difference: My son is white.

Raising a child with mental illness is incredibly hard work, but as a white family, we’ve also experienced:

• Tremendous support throughout the mental health-care system.
• Empathy and kindness from health-care workers.
• Praise for our parenting skills and told we were doing everything we could for him.
• Assurance that his disorder was not our fault, that we had not caused it and could not have prevented it.
• Early intervention into his severe case.
• A care team that spoke our language, understood our culture, and who looked like us.
• Personalized attention as we’re ushered through the children’s mental health system with referral after referral.
• Medication.
• Therapy.
• Hope.

If we were a family of color, we probably would have experienced:

• Half the likelihood of receiving mental health care.
• Jumping through hoops to get him the care he needed.
• Waiting years longer for a diagnosis and treatment.
• Teachers choosing to suspend our son, starting as early as preschool, instead of helping us locate care for his illness.
• A higher chance of suspension throughout his school years.
• A higher chance of arrest.
• Possible foster care placement.
• White healthcare professionals who may not understand our culture or experiences, or speak our language.
• Blame.
• Racial stereotypes and bias from doctors.
• Excessive questions about our home life.
• Behavior caused by mental illness brushed off as learned behavior.
• Parenting classes suggested instead of medication or therapy to treat the condition.
• Punishments, not referrals for mental health assessment and care.
• No benefit of the doubt.

Being white helped my son receive the caring early intervention he needed. But white privilege didn’t end when he got his referrals.

Racial bias and lack of cultural understanding from doctors leave children of color more likely to be misdiagnosed, or underdiagnosed, meaning they do not benefit from adequate care and adaptive programming at school. And even when a correct diagnosis is made, they are less likely to be prescribed medication to help treat their disorder.

Even when children of color are prescribed medication, it may not work as well. Medical research often excludes them, but genetic differences correlated with race can make certain drugs less effective.

Genetic testing is one way to gain insight into which drugs may work best for a given individual, but guess who is more likely to be able to afford expensive tests not covered by insurance? White families.

As doctors take longer to find the right medication for a child of color, that child’s parents must miss work to make more appointments and help their child cope with uncomfortable or unbearable side effects.

In short, the mental health system is failing families of color.

This failure is especially cruel given that people of color are at higher risk for mental illness, simply because of their race. Being discriminated against increases risk. Family trauma increases risk, generation after generation. People of color, on average, deal with more frequent and exhausting stressors- from constant microaggressions to the child welfare system.

What about watching the news and seeing people of color in mental health crisis — people like you or your child — killed by police, one after another?

Deborah Danner
Loreal Tsingine
Tanisha Anderson
Lavall Hall
Charleena Lyles
Debra Chrisjohn
Kenneth Chamberlain
Ezell Ford
Phuong Na Du
Joshua Barre
Laquan McDonald
Kayla Moore.

That’s just to name a few. Police respond to calls about people of color who are not committing a crime — but experiencing a mental health crisis — and too often they respond by killing them. Think those stories could add to the stress and trauma of families of color dealing with mental illness? Absolutely.

Living with mental illness isn’t easy for my son. It will never be. Whiteness cannot make his terrifying, intrusive thoughts go away. We have to advocate for his right to be in mainstream public schools. We stand with him through his public meltdowns, feeling the stares and hearing the snarky comments. We still worry what his future will bring.

But we are okay. When the terrifying thoughts come, he has learned how to deal with them, and we know how to help him through them. He can play and dance and learn and be a child again. Even though our lives will always revolve around mental illness, we are out from under it now thanks, in large part, to the early and caring treatment he has received.

After I heard about Pierre Coriolan, I couldn’t stop picturing him in his last moments. He had been breaking dishes in his apartment; he was holding a screwdriver and couldn’t put it down even when threatened by police. I could imagine every moment of his terror, his meltdown. Because those same meltdowns have happened so often in my own house.

Being white doesn’t prevent my son from having episodes of mental health crisis, but his whiteness does affect the way people respond to him when he’s in crisis.

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