HEALTH
BURNING WORK, JUNE 22, 2020
Chaired by Trish Stewart
Faye Bruce
Stress Kills: Despite many acts of parliament and recommended industry guidelines, deep racial disparities persist in health. By favouring qualitative research over quantitative, Faye began to uncover some of the reasons why current legislation was not adequate to end racial disparities in health. A major factor Faye identified was heightened allostatic load, or 'wear and tear on the body'. This condition is caused by chronic stresses directly and indirectly caused as a result of structural and everyday racism. Trauma is also a factor that relates to this condition. As Black people, we not only carry our own traumatic experiences, but must live through and be reminded constantly of how our experience relates to an intergenerational condition reproduced along lines of race.
Listening to Testimony: The Caribbean and African Health Network (CAHN) came about as a result of Faye's research process which aims to stop work being conducted in silo's. She believes that the more we gather around our common experiences, the greater our ability to identify the changes we need to make, and speak with a united voice to enact a new approach to improve our health. The key part of the process commonly missing is locating what specific changes need to be made. Problems can be identified through analysing the data, but it's only through listening to the testimony of those affected and sharing what we find where we can discover solutions. The CAHN infrastructure allows information collected from communities to travel to authorities and decision makers, while also allowing information to effectively travel into communities, empowering them with knowledge.
COVID-19: The statistic that Black and Asian people are four times as likely to contract Covid-19 has triggered calls for a public inquiry. In response to this statistic, combined with the national praising of healthcare workers where Black people continue to play a central role, Faye states how "We play the role of frontier, acting as a protective yet insufficiently protected barrier". Hypocrisy underpins the outpouring of sentiment for health care workers versus the reality of racial disparities in the death toll. While there is a quick response to reduce freedoms in order to stop people spreading the virus further, there is little interest in understanding and reducing racial disparities in the disportioncate infection rate.
Dawn Edge
Dawn Edge
The State of Black Mental Health Dawn Edge witnessed the extent of how disenfranchised Black people are from mental health services, through conducting a series of interviews at mothers and babies hospital wards during her post-doctoral research." We don't tend to see many Black women here" a nurse told her. Of course it wasn't that Black women weren't giving birth at that hospital, the problem was that they were not recommended the specialist care available to help mother's deal with post-natal depression and bonding with their babies. Dawn Edge found that the nurses were 'colour blind'. In a health service set up to deliver equality of care to anybody who comes through the door, this makes sense. But when there are cultural differences in how people respond to questions around mental health colour blindness can result in Black mental health issues becoming invisibl. Black people may respond to how they are feeling as 'feeling down' rather than using the word 'depressed' and can be fed back the 'strong black narrative', resulting in the denial of the care that they may need.
A Danger To Society Through her research, Prof. Edge found that Black people may not be receiving the care they need, meaning many treatable issues remain undiagnosed. She also found major problem of Black people being disproportionately over-diagnosed and over-medicated for certain mental health conditions. Caribbean people are nine times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. For people from African backgrounds, it is six times as likely than a white British person. They are also given longer courses of medication to treat the same conditions. These points raise questions around how medical judgements intersect with race to reproduce racial disparities.
Nobody To Talk To, Nobody trained to Listen Professor Dawn Edge builds on an earlier point on how Black people are less likely to communicate mental health issues through existing channels. But when speaking to therapists, she explains how Black people often find they are not listened to or understood by professional therapists. Everyday experiences are not the same for Black and White people and so where practices are built upon deviating from the 'norm', there is warped ground from which to base decisions on. "I feel like I get followed around shops" - Is a very common experience for a Black person. Whereas therapists may understand this as the patient perceiving something that is not real as they can't relate to the realities of the Black experience. Dawn makes the point of how she finds it truly shocking that medical professionals are able to graduate from studies with no cultural education whatsoever when it evidently places a huge role in the delivery of health care.