"First of all, I definitely believe implicit bias is an issue in behavioral health. In many ways I think behavioral health is more vulnerable to implicit bias because so much of how we interact with patients depends on the subjective viewpoint of that provider. The provider decides what they see in front of them and how they tend to treat it so I think the bias is there. I think the challenge for us is to first of all recognize that our behavioral health profession, the profession that I love, is really built on bias. Most of the treatment models that we use were based on white Anglo-Saxon male perspectives. And they were built and designed at a time when people of color, and women, were thought of as lesser. And the LGTBQ community would have been thought of as mentally ill. So if that’s the basis of our treatment, we have to think differently about the models of treatment that we use. And part of that is we have to invest in more partnerships with providers that represent historically marginalized populations, we have to fund more research that speaks to the nuances of race, culture and ethnicity, and you have to understand, as a provider you have to understand, that our whole focus, building relationships with patients, is supposed to be from a person-centered, patient-centered perspective. But how can you engage in a person-centered relationship with me if you don’t acknowledge and respect the challenges that I face. The systemic racism. The socio-economic challenges that I face. My life experience through my lens as a Black man in America. And if you cannot do that, if we don’t accept that as providers, then you have to also accept the fact that your interaction with me may become another traumatic experience that I have to carry. So I think that’s where we begin.
31.41 I’ll share a story with you that I often share with providers to kind of help them understand that. So, I live in Charlotte now. And love Charlotte but about 5 years ago, there was a lot of civil unrest in Charlotte. Much like we’ve seen over the past year. And it was because of the shooting of a black man, Keith Lamont Scott, by a Charlotte Mecklenburg police officer. And, so there was a lot of tension in the community. But one of the things that I do is that I get up very early and I exercise. I get up about 4 o’clock in the morning. I get up, I stretch, I run and I try to be at the gym by 5 o’clock // so this one particular morning, I finish my run, it’s about quarter to five, it’s dark, South Charlotte, and I’m walking to the gym, I’ve got my hoodie on, and I notice these lights, this car is trailing me and I can see the headlights, and I can kinda hear the purr of the engine. So I know at some point I’ve got to turn and face this vehicle, because it is not going past, it is not turning off. So I finally turn and look and I see the letters on the vehicle, CMPD, Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department. And given the backdrop of everything going on, I know this is not good. Here I am, black man, before day in the morning, I’m in a predominantly white neighborhood, I’ve got my hoodie on. And then, as I lock eyes with the driver, low and behold it was a white male officer. So again, I know, this is not going to end well. But then the officer, first he asked me a question that I wasn’t expecting. I looked at him and he said, did you know you were being followed? And so I just kind of stammered and said, no, I didn’t know I was being followed. Of course I knew, but I didn’t know how to answer his question. But then he followed that up with something that was even more surprising. He said, there’s a fox that’s been following you for the past two blocks. And we’ve been having reports of a rabid fox in this community and as I turned and looked into the darkness about 30 yards into the darkness I could see the fox’s little ears sticking up and he said, I just wanted to make sure you were ok. And then the fox must have heard us talking about him because he turned up and ran across the church yard. And he said, I’m going to follow him to make sure he doesn’t hurt anybody. You have a nice day. Now I share that story with people because, first of all // everybody goes somewhere in that story in their minds. For some people, when I say I get up at 4 o’clock in the morning, I lose you right there, because you automatically say, I can not relate to this guy because he’s totally different. But for some people, when I say, there’s a car that’s trailing me, based on their life experience, I know where this is going. When I paint the picture of me.. black man, about the right size for taking, in a hoodie, walking up and down the neighborhood before morning, and it’s a white, male police officer, again, people based on their life experience, say, I think I know where this is going. But unless you’ve heard this story before, you never anticipate there’s a fox at the end of this story. Because it’s not your life experience. So the question that I pose to clinicians is, are you finishing my story based on your life experience? Are you reading into my life experience based on yours? Are you willing to hear my story? Hear the end of my story? Learn how my story ends? And learn how my life experience tells my story. And I think that’s the challenge that we have. That we as a behavioral health community, as behavioral health providers, as change agents, as policy makers, we’ve got to see the story differently. And we can’t apply our lens. If we do what we’ve historically done, we will continue to disenfranchise Black and brown people and continue to disenfranchise historically marginalized populations. If history has taught us anything, it is that it is very difficult to build equity on the back end. And if we don’t at some point begin to weave equity into what we do, we’re going to continually have these disproportionately bad outcomes."
