Health Beliefs in the African American Community

Session one addresses the long and obscured history of medical abuses perpetrated against the African American community, that predate the Tuskegee experiment. Among other items, we'll review:

• The work of medical ethicist Harriet Washington, who catalogued a harrowing set of abuses from slavery to the present.
• The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South, by Chip Jones, chronicling one of the earliest heart transplants in the US, taken from the body of a Black man to save the life of a white man in Richmond, Virginia, in 1968.

Consideration of medical abuses on the African American community will be discussed with regard to current help-seeking behaviors.

Session two examines the history of African American mental health care within the US, including efforts by doctors during the ante-bellum period to establish professional legitimacy by claiming to expertise in slave medicine and fabricating psychiatric disorders that were attributed exclusively to enslaved people. Session two also traces the IQ testing movement and sterilization during the early and mid-20^th century. These encounters have had an intergenerational effect on the manner in which many, though certainly not all African Americans approach mental health care.

In the final session of this course, participants will discuss implications of medical and mental health abuses and irregularities within the African American community, as it pertains to delayed treatment, cultural mistrust, trauma, and vicarious trauma. Culturally responsive frameworks of care will be addressed, including Multicultural Orientation and the Continuum of Broaching Behavior.