Call for a ‘Live Third’: The Impact of Institutional and Psychiatric Racism on Adebayo’s Physical and Mental Health

Abi Canepa-Anson*

Call for a ‘Live Third’: The Impact of Institutional and Psychiatric Racism on Adebayo’s Physical and Mental Health.

The author refers to a personal experience and feels it important to do so in order to highlight a crippling and appalling inhumanity by some towards black people. Much of what is written here is presented in the first person owing to the personal nature of the narrative. It manifests through stereotyping, stigmatisation, and racism towards non-white people.

The Hearing Voices Network forum, believes one can become mentally ill as a result of extreme stress or trauma, and this can be a part of the root cause of the illness of schizophrenia.
Someone experiencing schizophrenia can have a psychotic breakdown. Psychosis is a breakdown or malfunction of repression.

In the absence of a mother or a father, one would expect a receptive other would have been helpful. The mental health institution became replacement parental figures as when Adebayo became 18, they took over responsibility for his care. Trust and hope was placed in the doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and care workers.

The workshop confirmed that hearing voices is a symptom of many different conditions. Sometimes, it can be a fleeting phenomenon with little significance or a general statement of
distress, and it shouldn’t mean a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In the early days, Adebayo reported hearing voices.

Biologists believe that schizophrenia is biological and link its cause to a chemical imbalance or the result of synthetic drug use. However, today, there is still no scientific evidence as to the
cause of schizophrenia. What has become evident is the level of psychiatric misdiagnosis of black men and that structural and interpersonal racism is rife in mental health institutions and severely disadvantages ethnic minorities, and significantly affects their health outcome.

Psychol Cogn Sci Open J. 2020; 6(1): 25-30. doi: 10.17140/PCSOJ-6-156

LATEST ARTICLES

 - 
Arabic
 - 
ar
Bengali
 - 
bn
German
 - 
de
English
 - 
en
French
 - 
fr
Hindi
 - 
hi
Indonesian
 - 
id
Portuguese
 - 
pt
Russian
 - 
ru
Spanish
 - 
es