The International Handbook of Black Community Mental Health

This is the first international handbook on Black community mental health, focussing on key issues including stereotypes in mental health, misdiagnoses, and inequalities/discrimination around access, services and provisions. Making use of a cultural competence framework throughout, the book covers many of the classic mental health/developmental areas such as schizophrenia, mental health disorders, ASD and ADHD, but it also looks at more controversial areas in mental health, like inequalities, racism and discrimination both in practice and in graduate school training and the supervisory experiences of black students in universities.
Unique among traditional academic texts addressing mental health, the book presents rich personal accounts from Black therapists and students. Many Black students who are training to become therapists or academics in mental health report negative experiences with white university staff in terms of a lack of support, encouragement, resulting in poor graduation outcomes. While institutional racism is a major issue both in society and universities, the editors of this Handbook take personal-level racism, microaggression and everyday racism as better models for understanding and analysing both these students' racialised interaction/communication experiences with white staff at university, as well as the racialised communications and inequalities in misdiagnoses, access to services and provisions in healthcare settings with white managers.