Institutional Racism in Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology by Suman Fernando

Institutional Racism in Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology by Suman Fernando

Author:Suman Fernando
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham


5.4 Racism in ‘Psy’ Research

There are many fundamental problems with psychiatric and psychological research (‘psy’ research), which is carried out in a context of institutional racism. I shall summarise them briefly. The first problem arises at the point of planning the questions to be asked. ‘Psy’ research, more than research in any other field of medicine or psychology, is politically driven. Apart from the obvious political forces like the pharmaceutical industry (that often funds psychiatric research), there are others (sometimes difficult to identify easily) that determine what is researched and what is not researched. In the field of clinical psychology, it is much more common to research matters that emanate from Western knowledge (‘white knowledge’)—such as, say, depressive feelings or related emotional states, than it is to research, say, spirituality or filial piety, which are associated with Indian or Chinese traditions. And, what is a cultural bias resembles (if not identical with) racial bias. The underlying agenda is that white knowledge supersedes any other knowledge (see ‘White knowledge’ in Chap. 7). But the greater issue is around how research is carried out.

The research strategy seldom, if ever, allows for the need to compensate for the inherent bias of researchers as revealed, for example, in the report Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia (see ‘Racism of a psychology report’ in Chap. 8). Even more importantly, research methods tend to be blind to the serious drawbacks of relying on empiricism as a scientific foundation for research in psychiatry (Harari 2001). Most psychiatric research starts off by marshalling so-called observable measurable data, assuming that all the data are value-free—or at least reasonably ‘objective’—and assumes that what is measured (and what is left out) is chosen at random or more often, because of clear-cut reasons. The fact is that the selection (made by choice) could be a hotbed for racist agendas or at least bias arising from institutional attitudes in psychology or psychiatry. Items measured as ‘phenomena’ (such as depression, thought disorder and hallucinations) are not objective ‘facts’ (in the case of ‘psy’ disciplines) although often treated as such. They are essentially judgements made by people trained in a particular cultural framework and so the conclusions drawn are value-laden and theory-laden (see Harari 2001). This is firm ground for institutional racism. Further, psychological and psychiatric data—unlike those in ‘hard’ natural sciences—are similar to data in social psychology in that they (the data) deal in events that fluctuate markedly over time, but are presented as static ‘facts’ (Gergen 1973)—again, racism can easily creep in at this level. For example, a propensity to aggressiveness, feelings of depression or ‘hearing voices’ may be noted as relatively stable ‘observations’ about a person and conclusions may be drawn about them—but only if the contextual realities around the events that were construed (as aggressiveness, feelings of depression, hallucinations) are ignored. In all of these cases, when judgements are being made in an essentially racist society, the context for white people may be very different to that for racialised people (see ‘Sociopolitical context’ in Chap.



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