African Americans receiving mental health services are disproportionately assessed with disruptive, defiant and psychotic disorders, evidence of the systemic racism that psychiatric and psychological associations admit is ingrained in mental health practices. Citizens Commission on Human Rights alerts the Black community to this reality.
by CCHR National Affairs Office
African Americans are more likely to receive mental health assessments of psychiatric disorders related to disruptive, defiant and psychotic behavior than other racial and ethnic groups, according to data in a newly released government report on Americans’ use of mental health services. Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is alerting the Black community to this fact during Minority Mental Health Awareness Month.
Psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health practitioners disproportionately labeled African Americans with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, conduct disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) in mental health programs operated or funded by state mental health agencies, a 2024 annual report from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) shows. The report used data collected in 2022.
African Americans comprise 33% of the individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders and 20% of those diagnosed with ADHD – significantly higher than their proportion (14%) of the U.S. population.
While African American children aged 0 to 17 years comprised 18% of all children receiving mental health services from state agencies, they represented 24% of children diagnosed with ADHD, 26% of children diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, and 27% of children diagnosed with conduct disorder.
The most frequent mental health diagnosis for Black children was ADHD, with the label given to four of every ten (38%) of them.
The report also calls into question any claims by mental health organizations that African American communities are underserved. While African Americans comprise 14% of the U.S. population, they accounted for 19% of individuals receiving services from state mental health agencies, which suggests that Blacks are overly diagnosed with psychiatric disorders.
An assignment of a psychiatric disorder by psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners is subjective and unscientific. Psychiatrist Thomas Insel, M.D., former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), publicly admitted in 2013 that psychiatry’s “diagnoses” lack validity. With no scientific basis for the diagnoses, the systemic racism now acknowledged to exist in psychiatric and psychological practice can creep into the assessment of a patient’s behavior as a mental disorder.
Systemic racism was admitted in a public apology in 2021 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), in which the APA admitted that psychiatrists’ “appalling past actions, as well as their harmful effects, are ingrained in the structure of psychiatric practice.”
The American Psychological Association issued its own public apology in 2021, acknowledging the role of psychologists “in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, and the harms that have been inflicted on communities of color as a result.”
Further evidence of ongoing racism in the mental health system is found in recent research revealing that Black psychiatric patients were nearly twice as likely to be physically, mechanically, or chemically restrained in psychiatric facilities than their White counterparts and to remain restrained for a longer time.
Since its founding in 1969 as a human rights organization and mental health industry watchdog, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights has exposed and campaigned against racism and racial abuse in the mental health system. CCHR intensified its efforts in 2020 by establishing the CCHR Task Force Against Psychiatric Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics, led by Rev. Fred Shaw, Jr. CCHR has worked with the NAACP since 2003 in exposing the stigmatizing labeling and drugging of African American children and, with Rev. Shaw, in obtaining two national resolutions from the NAACP and one from the National Caucus of Black State Legislators related to these issues.