In this edited volume, three leading experts in race, mental health, and contextual behavior science address the urgent problem of racial inequities and biases, whichoften prevent people of color from seeking mental health services--leading to poor outcomes if and when they do receive treatment. This critical and timely guide provides clinicians and educators with evidence-based recommendations for addressing inequities at multiple levels, as well as best practices for compassionately and effectively helping clients across a range of cultural groups and settings.

Eliminating Race-Based Mental Health Disparities offers concrete guidelines and evidence-based best practices for addressing racial inequities and biases in clinical care. Perhaps there is no subject more challenging than the intricacies of race and racism in American culture. More and more, it has become clear that simply teaching facts about cultural differences between racial and ethnic groups is not adequate to achieve cultural competence in clinical care. One must also consider less “visible” constructs—including implicit bias, stereotypes, white privilege, intersectionality, and microaggressions—as potent drivers of behaviors and attitudes. In this edited volume, three leading experts in race, mental health, and contextual behavior science explore the urgent problem of racial inequities and biases, which often prevent people of color from seeking mental health services—leading to poor outcomes if and when they do receive treatment. In this much-needed resource, you’ll find evidence-based recommendations for addressing problems at multiple levels, and best practices for compassionately and effectively helping clients across a range of cultural groups and settings. As more and more people gain access to services that have historically been unavailable to them, guidelines for cultural competence in clinical care are needed. Eliminating Race-Based Mental Health Disparities offers a comprehensive road map to help you address racial health disparities and improve treatment outcomes in your practice.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Offers an innovative plan to eliminate inequalities in American health care and save the lives they endanger Over 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities: the unfair, unjust, and avoidable differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites. Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system—and in Just Medicine Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients. Implicit bias is the single most important determinant of health and health care disparities. Because we have missed this fact, the money we spend on training providers to become culturally competent, expanding wellness education programs and community health centers, and even expanding access to health insurance will have only a modest effect on reducing health disparities. We will continue to utterly fail in the effort to eradicate health disparities unless we enact strong, evidence-based legal remedies that accurately address implicit and unintentional forms of discrimination, to replace the weak, tepid, and largely irrelevant legal remedies currently available. Our continued failure to fashion an effective response that purges the effects of implicit bias from American health care, Matthew argues, is unjust and morally untenable. In this book, she unites medical, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology research on implicit bias and health disparities with her own expertise in civil rights and constitutional law. In a time when the health of the entire nation is at risk, it is essential to confront the issues keeping the health care system from providing equal treatment to all.

An essential text for courses in public health, health policy, and sociology, this compelling book is a vital teaching tool and a comprehensive reference for social science and medical professionals.

"The text is state-of-the-art in its analysis of health disparities from both domestic and international perspectives. Minority Populations and Health: An Introduction to Health Disparities in the United States is a welcome addition to the field because it widens access to the complex issues underlying the health disparities problem. "-- Preventing Chronic Disease/CDC, October 2005 "This is a very comprehensive, evidence-based book dealing with the health disparities that plague the United States. This is a welcome and valuable addition to the field of health care for minority groups in the United States."-- Doody's Publishers Bulletin, August 2005 "Health isn’t color-blind. Racial minorities disproportionately suffer from some diseases, but experts say race alone doesn’t completely account for the disparities. Newsweek's Jennifer Barrett Ozols spoke with Thomas LaVeist, director of the Center for Health Disparities Solutions at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and author of the upcoming book, "Minority Populations and Health: An Introduction to Health Disparities in the U.S." (Jossey-Bass) about race and medicine. "-- MSNBC/Newsweek interview with author Thomas L. LaVeist, February 2005 "The book is readable and organized to be quickly read with specifics readily retrievable. It is comprehensive and visual."-- Journal of the American Medical Association, September 2005 Minority Populations and Health is a textbook that offers a complete foundation in the core issues and theoretical frameworks for the development of policy and interventions to address race disparities in health-related outcomes. This book covers U.S. health and social policy, the role of race and ethnicity in health research, social factors contributing to mortality, longevity and life expectancy, quantitative and demographic analysis and access, and utilization of health services. Instructors material available at http://www.minorityhealth.com

The Social Determinants of Mental Health aims to fill the gap that exists in the psychiatric, scholarly, and policy-related literature on the social determinants of mental health: those factors stemming from where we learn, play, live, work, and age that impact our overall mental health and well-being. The editors and an impressive roster of chapter authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds provide detailed information on topics such as discrimination and social exclusion; adverse early life experiences; poor education; unemployment, underemployment, and job insecurity; income inequality, poverty, and neighborhood deprivation; food insecurity; poor housing quality and housing instability; adverse features of the built environment; and poor access to mental health care. This thought-provoking book offers many beneficial features for clinicians and public health professionals: Clinical vignettes are included, designed to make the content accessible to readers who are primarily clinicians and also to demonstrate the practical, individual-level applicability of the subject matter for those who typically work at the public health, population, and/or policy level. Policy implications are discussed throughout, designed to make the content accessible to readers who work primarily at the public health or population level and also to demonstrate the policy relevance of the subject matter for those who typically work at the clinical level. All chapters include five to six key points that focus on the most important content, helping to both prepare the reader with a brief overview of the chapter's main points and reinforce the "take-away" messages afterward. In addition to the main body of the book, which focuses on selected individual social determinants of mental health, the volume includes an in-depth overview that summarizes the editors' and their colleagues' conceptualization, as well as a final chapter coauthored by Dr. David Satcher, 16th Surgeon General of the United States, that serves as a "Call to Action," offering specific actions that can be taken by both clinicians and policymakers to address the social determinants of mental health. The editors have succeeded in the difficult task of balancing the individual/clinical/patient perspective and the population/public health/community point of view, while underscoring the need for both groups to work in a unified way to address the inequities in twenty-first century America. The Social Determinants of Mental Health gives readers the tools to understand and act to improve mental health and reduce risk for mental illnesses for individuals and communities. Students preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) will also benefit from this book, as the MCAT in 2015 will test applicants' knowledge of social determinants of health. The social determinants of mental health are not distinct from the social determinants of physical health, although they deserve special emphasis given the prevalence and burden of poor mental health.