Eliminating stigma and bias in favor of behavioral health equity and parity must become part of our healthcare agenda if we truly wish to eliminate systemic harm to BIPOC and struggling families.
Are you aware that you hold unconscious judgements about people who have behavioral health challenges that contribute to societal harm of vulnerable families, especially BIPOC ones?
Washington State’s Senate Health and Long Term Care Committee is working on equity and parity, yet behavioral health — which critically contributes to overall health, safety, and well-being of both the individual and family — is not part of the discussion. Local leaders missed critical health outcomes that are disproportionately experienced by BIPOC families who have not received appropriate behavioral health care, e.g.
- teen pregnancy, rape and sexually transmitted diseases
- increased suicidiality
- lower mortality rates
- increased drug and alcohol addiction
This of course doesn’t include homelessness, incarceration, prostitution, and perhaps most devastingly, the destruction of the integrity and safety of BIPOC families.
There are 8 damaging assumptions that our healthcare system and other safety net providers make when it comes to children and youth struggling with behavioral health challenges. These biases undermine the health, integrity and well-being of BIPOC families. Do you hold any of these assumptions?
- When a child has chronic misbehavior, it’s usually the parent’s fault
- Child Protective System protects children
- The Foster Care system protects children
- The At Risk Youth system protects children
- Jail is a good thing for a defiant child
- Behavioral health isn’t a special education issue
- We can address children’s behavioral health the way we treat adults
- The system is broken, there’s nothing anyone involved can do
NPR has reported that COVID-19 has exacerbated an already broken children’s behavioral health system. The situation in Washington is as dire as any other state. We are boarding children in emergency rooms because we wait for a crisis to help and lack the intensive services these families need.
When individual rights allow children to be incarcerated instead of cared for, when parents must give up their custodial rights in order to access care for disabled children, when jail is the defacto mental health safety net and children are being boarded in emergency rooms, there is something seriously wrong with OUR progressive values. Why do we believe that someone else would be more capable of caring for behaviorally challenged children than their parents? Foster care is rooted in racism. Juvenile justice is rooted in racism. Individual rights which ignore the fundamental support that families provide dependent children underpin and support these racist systems.
Now is the time to focus on ourselves and have open discussions about how we can navigate the chasm between what we believe is right and what the right believes about us. We must center behavioral health wellness of BIPOC families in our thinking moving forward.