America’s Hidden Racial Divide: A Mysterious Gap in Psychosis Rates

Earl Miller’s favorite book is “The Old Man and the Sea.” Growing up, whenever I moved, I made sure to put a Hemingway novella in one of two black plastic garbage bags. One bag contained a book he had stolen along the way. The other thing is some of his clothes. His home since he was 12 years old has been a psychiatric ward, a residential program, and a foster home for white parents who quickly decided they could not handle a seriously ill and deeply troubled black child.

“I’ve always been very drawn to the idea that there is beauty in waste, in efforts that ultimately end in failure,” Miller says of the story of the unlucky fisherman. Ta. For three months when Miller was 22, he lived under the wooden bench we now sit on, facing a small lake in a park in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. “In the struggle itself, there is a moving conversation, almost a conversation, between a fish fighting for its life and an old man fighting for his livelihood.” I continued about the book. I also like the way Hemingway describes things, how he strives towards a single point, how the sunlight shines through the fish even when everything is shattered. ”

We weren’t supposed to talk about Hemingway. But Miller, 38, regrets it: With a family of ducks at our feet and a breeze blowing through the shoreline reeds, we took the detour. Our main topics were race and mental illness.

A growing body of research has revealed that black people in the U.S. suffer from psychotic hallucinations and delusions at roughly the same rate as voices coming from outside their heads, hallucinations, paranoia, and a disconnection from a common reality. I am suffering from twice as many as white people. In Europe, racial disparities regarding mental illness are even wider. Even after researchers control for socioeconomic factors and address diagnostic issues, alarming racial disparities remain.

Research suggesting a link between minority and outsider status and mental illness dates back nearly a century. A 1932 study looked at psychiatric hospitalizations in Minnesota. They found that Norwegian immigrants are accepted at twice the rate of native Minnesotans and Norwegians. By the 1970s, researchers began to pay particular attention to racial disparities in mental illness, and by the 2000s, researchers began to focus on the relationship between race and mental illness, including race and more general symptoms such as depression. (which appears to exceed the correlation between States and Europe. But despite the growing data, until recently the issue had been relegated to the margins, or perhaps the margins, of mainstream psychiatry in the United States.