Lillian Comas-Diaz - Addressing the Roots of Racial Trauma
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
Lillian Comas-Díaz is a pioneer in the field of ethnocultural approaches to mental health. She is both a clinical practitioner and multicultural feminist psychologist, writing numerous journal articles and books pushing the field toward more inclusive and less ethnocentric theories and practices.
She was recently awarded the 2019 American Psychological Association gold medal awardfor lifetime achievement and the practice of psychology, the first time a person of color has been recognized with the award. She credits the long-term, collective effort of professionals of color working on expanding psychology's lens to include the perspectives of marginalized peoples' experiences.
Comas-Díaz, along with her colleagues, recently introduced a special issue on the concept they call racial trauma (see MIA report). She describes racial trauma as "an insidious type of distress that many people of color and other marginalized individuals experience, where they are living in a society where racism, heterosexism, classism, and all those kinds of 'isms' are making the society oppressive towards those targeted groups."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:13.3 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast. My name is Hannah Emerson. I'm a news reporter at Madden America. |
| 0:20.4 | You can find our science news coverage |
| 0:22.1 | at Maddenamerica.com slash research-dash-news. Today I get to talk to clinical practitioner |
| 0:28.4 | and multicultural and feminist psychologist, Dr. Lillian Comaz-Diaz. She has been involved |
| 0:34.8 | in the Committee on Women in Psychology and the American Psychological Association, where she played a major role in creating Division 45, the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, becoming its secretary-treasurer and editor-in-chief of its journal, Cultural Diversity and Mental Health. |
| 0:53.8 | She is author of several books on Multicultural Care and editor of many others, |
| 0:58.4 | and her career focus spans ethnocultural approaches to mental health, |
| 1:02.8 | cultural competency, feminism and gender studies, |
| 1:06.7 | intersecting identities, social justice, women's spirituality, and multiculturalism. |
| 1:12.7 | She recently introduced a special issue in the American Psychologist Journal on the latest |
| 1:17.3 | psychological research and what her team calls racial trauma, which we will get to explore in this podcast. |
| 1:23.3 | Just this month, she was awarded the American Psychological Association Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement and the Practice of Psychology. |
| 1:31.5 | Congratulations, Dr. Comas Diaz, and welcome to the MIA podcast. |
| 1:35.4 | Thank you, and I am delighted to be here today. |
| 1:38.7 | Thank you. |
| 1:39.4 | I'm also very grateful that you're here today and have your voice among the others at Madin America who grapple with science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 1:48.3 | So to get as much as we can from you, let's get started with perhaps you could connect us to how you've grown to research ethnocultural approaches to mental health. |
| 1:57.5 | Maybe it was response from your own personal story or your psychological training. |
| 2:01.8 | Yes, absolutely. Being a mixed race woman, a woman of color, and having a transnational background, |
| 2:10.3 | meaning that I was born in Chicago, some Puerto Rican parents, and then we moved back to the |
| 2:16.1 | island. So I grew up in Puerto Rico, and then I came back forth studying to the United States. |
... |
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