Word: psychiatrists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Different Approaches. Treating a black patient and treating a white patient can call for differences in approach, and some black psychiatrists subtly accommodate them. Where traditional therapy encourages the patient to adjust to the world as it is, black therapy extends a more activist invitation. "How can you tell a black patient to adjust to this society?" asks Black Psychiatrist Price M. Cobbs. "We don't. For the black patient to become healthy, he must engage himself in changing a society that needs changing." This is not to say, of course, that all black emotional problems can be traced...
...necessary, the black therapist also redefines mental illness. "There are some behavior patterns that one could call pathological," says Charles Wilkinson, a black psychiatrist and executive director of the Kansas City Mental Health Foundation. "But it's a question whether they are really pathological or simply adaptive. If judged by the majority of the prevailing culture, they could be called pathological. But from the black person's standpoint, they have been patterns he has had to use to make it." It is scarcely paranoid, for instance, for the black to distrust and fear the white society. Says...
...Many psychiatrists are less impressed by the incidence of emotional disorder in blacks than by their ability to find positive and useful ways of living with the severe stresses imposed by their environment. "I don't know why they aren't crazier than they are," says Dr. Hugh F. Butts, a black psychiatrist from Manhattan. Dr. Robert Sharpley of Boston, a black therapist whose practice includes a number of black students from Harvard, feels that the black capacity to survive against huge odds deserves more attention than it has received. He speculates that the kind of solidarity...
Nationally, the white suicide rate is 21 times the rate for blacks. But among males in the 20-to-34-year-old bracket, the ratio is almost even; in big-city ghettos, the black male rate may be double the white. Why? White Psychiatrist Herbert Hendin blames "a sense of despair, a feeling that life will never be satisfying...
Contempt and Loathing. White Americans today are no less ambivalent. No matter how firmly they protest that they "have nothing against the black." contempt and loathing have become embedded in the language. Black Psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint points out: "In the legacy of our civilization, the color black has been virtually synonymous with 'sin' and 'bad'-witness such terms as black sheep, black magic, blacklist, blackguard, blackball, black lie and many others. The word is associated with all the dirty, lowly, unintellectual functions in human life. The word white is usually invested with the opposite meanings...