Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Mental Health Care

Issues of racism and social injustice have finally captured the attention of the academic community, following the international outrage and protest against racism in response to the recent killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people. In addition to these appalling episodes of police violence and vigilantism, the COVID-19 pandemic has further revealed racial-ethnic inequities as evidenced by the disproportionate morbidity and mortality of Black, Latinx, indigenous, and other persons of color. Many academic journals are wrestling with how to respond to the current “syndemic” of anti-Black racism and the COVID-19 pandemic and have issued a call to action for all those involved in research, clinical care, and education.

In June 2019, prior to the groundswell of support for scholarly work focused on health disparities, Psychiatric Services curated an Editor’s Choice collection on racial-ethnic mental health disparities. This original collection focused on characterizing the problem, financial considerations, quality of care received, and proposed solutions. Given the importance of this topic, with renewed attention and global priority, we updated this collection to highlight publications within the past 2 years that center on additional topics, including experiences of mental illness in other vulnerable populations, such as sexual minorities, youths, and those involved in the carceral system; barriers related to accessing mental health services among people of color; and thoughtful solutions to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities. We encourage readers to listen to our Psychiatric Services From Pages to Practice podcast (Episode 36, August 2020), where we discuss factors contributing to these ongoing disparities and critically analyze ways to move forward. The field of psychiatry cannot move forward without deliberate scholarship and action in the realm of social justice. We invite our colleagues to commit to this work and engage in the conversation; to start, we offer a few curated items to delve into the nuances related to racial and ethnic disparities in mental health.