Eliminating Race-based Mental Health Disparities: Promoting Equity and Culturally Responsive Care Across 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 behaviours and attitudes.

In this edited volume, three leading experts in race, mental health, and contextual behaviour 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.

Monnica T. Williams, PhD, ABPP, is a board-certified clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Psychological Sciences, with a joint appointment Psychiatry. She completed her undergraduate studies at MIT (biotechnology) and UCLA (psychology). She received her master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Virginia, where she conducted research in the areas of major mental illness, tests and measurement, and ethnic differences. Her clinical work and research focus on African American mental health, culture, trauma, and OCD. She serves on the scientific advisory board of the International OCD Foundation, the editorial board of several scientific journals, and is currently an associate editor of The Behavior Therapist and New Ideas in Psychology. Williams has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, focused on psychopathology and cultural differences. She gives diversity trainings nationally. Her work has been featured in several major media outlets, including NPR, CNN, and the New York Times.

Daniel C. Rosen, PhD, is chair and associate professor in the department of counseling and health psychology at Bastyr University, and founding codirector of The Daniel K. Church Center for Social Justice & Diversity. He earned a PhD in counseling psychology from Arizona State University after completing his predoctoral internship at the Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology at Boston Medical Center/Boston University School of Medicine. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Behavioral Medicine Program at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School. Rosen's scholarship is focused in multicultural psychology, and has explored issues of social justice in mental health, addressing disparities in access to and quality of mental health services, and antisemitism-related stress. He has a private practice in Seattle, WA.

Jonathan Kanter, PhD, received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Washington in 2002, and then moved to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he spent several years collaborating closely with members of the Black, Latinx and Muslim communities on issues of social and political activism (including police brutality and voter rights), racism and discrimination, and culturally appropriate treatments of depression. In 2013, Kanter came to the University of Washington to direct the Center for the Science of Social Connection (CSSC), where he approaches projects with a contextual behavioral science model that integrates disciplines, including evolution science, neuroscience, anthropology and psychology, within a behavioral science foundation. Kanter is regularly invited to give talks and workshops nationally and internationally on topics of interest to the Center, including anti-racism workshops, workshops for therapists on how to improve psychotherapy relationships and help clients with relational problems, and culturally tailored behavioral treatments for depression.