Dispatches from a "Post-Racial" America: When Mental Health Collides with Race

  By T.M. Bonner

       The latest edition of Dispatches from a ‘Post-Racial’ America highlights three incidents in which Mental Health issues collided with race – but not in a healthy, progressive way that would result in knowledge and solutions. 

  Americans of all races and ethnicities are confronted with mental health issues in their lives, whether themselves or a family member or friend. But the way the media mishandled a recent study shows how all is not equal when it comes to mental health issues of white Americans versus African-Americans and other minorities.

     In fact, sometimes the same mental health issue is even given a different name when it afflicts African-Americans and other minorities (thus, ensuring inequality in the recognition of the problem and inequality in research and treatment). So, folks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) becomes “Hood Disease.” What? Read on…

   

   Apparently, it’s the season to physically assault and racially terrorize a person suffering from mental illness -- if they are of a certain race. And it kinda helps if the victimizer is a judge who could decide that this is, in fact, legal. Read on…

    Lastly, when a serial killer goes, well, serial killer, we in America must ensure that the discussion of his ‘mental health’ should take center stage and remain separate from the discussion of his racist tendencies. Racism and mental health issues can work in tandem in some cases to cause destruction and grief. But we ignored this truth in the now infamous Elliot Rodger case, where racism was the underlying motivator for the killer who goes off the deep end because he just couldn’t understand why being an entitled white male didn’t result in better luck with white women than ‘lesser’ minority beings. 

     But who needs to concern themselves with the fine print, right? Read more about the racism within Elliot Rodger here...