Helena Hansen - Combatting Structural Racism and Classism in Psychiatry
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 213 Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2021
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Helena Hanson is professor and chair of translational social science and health equity and associate director for the center for social medicine at UCLA. As a psychiatrist and anthropologist, she has spent much of her career researching how race, class, gender, and social determinants of health affect psychiatric diagnosis and treatment.
Growing up in 1970's Oakland and Berkeley, California, Hansen witnessed the consequences of deinstitutionalization and mass incarceration policies firsthand. Losing family members to both the prison and mental health systems gave her a personal understanding of the social and structural failures she interrogates in her work today. She also draws on the principles she learned as a participant in AIDS-related activism to mobilize community organizations and champion mutual aid groups in combatting our current mental health crises.
In this interview, Hansen discusses how race and class affect psychiatric diagnoses and subsequent treatment, the moral implications of psychiatric diagnosis, structural competency, and more.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Richard Sears here today with Dr. Helena Hansen. Dr. Hansen is professor and chair of the |
| 0:19.9 | research theme in translational social science and health equity, |
| 0:23.6 | as well as Associate Director for the Center for Social Medicine at UCLA. |
| 0:27.6 | She's a psychiatrist and anthropologist and has researched how race, class, gender, and the like affect psychiatric diagnosis. |
| 0:35.6 | Welcome, Dr. Hansen, and thank you for making time to talk with us today. |
| 0:38.7 | Thank you. Great to be here. So we're just going to jump right in here. I was wondering first, |
| 0:45.3 | if you could just tell us a bit about what brought you to your work. How did you end up interested in |
| 0:50.5 | psychiatry and anthropology? And specifically, how did you end up kind of looking at |
| 0:55.6 | this question of intersectionality and psychiatric diagnosis? Well, okay, I'll try to give you the |
| 1:01.3 | short version. And since I'm speaking to a contributor to Mad in America, I'll start up by saying |
| 1:09.2 | that it's probably because I was mad as in angry. |
| 1:14.1 | In my childhood was profoundly shaped by the mental health, quote unquote, system in California. |
| 1:23.2 | And the fact that, you know, I grew up in the 70s in Oakland and Berkeley, California, |
| 1:28.9 | just in the moment of deinstitutionalization in California. |
| 1:34.4 | So a couple of things were happening. |
| 1:36.2 | That is that the mental hospitals are being closed with a very, you know, good kind of verbalized motive of getting people out into community |
| 1:45.7 | and not confined in mental hospitals. But there was nothing on the other end, right? No community |
| 1:52.6 | services, no supports. And so, you know, I remember basically on my way to school and back, |
| 1:59.8 | a lot of people sleeping on the streets, you know, |
| 2:02.1 | and just having kind of find my way through a maze of people who clearly had just been |
| 2:07.2 | totally abandoned. But then, you know, the other part of that story is mass incarceration was |
... |
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