Jacqui Dyer: "Mental health is everyone’s business"

source: The Guardian
published: 8 November 2017

For Jacqui Dyer, trying to talk about the issue of race and inequality in mental health services is sometimes like “pulling teeth”. Yet the over-representation of black people in inpatient mental health services is part of the country’s “dirty secret” that needs to be addressed once and for all.

“Wherever there is exclusion or detention in this society, that’s where you find over-representation of black people,” says Dyer, who argues that the notion of the black person as “big, black and dangerous” still prevails within institutional service settings.

Dyer, 51, has just been appointed to the advisory panel for the government’s Mental Health Act , which aims to investigate, among other things, why a disproportionate number of black, Asian and minority ethnic people are detained under the act. It is too early to say what the review will achieve, but Dyer is clear that detention cannot be seen in isolation from the systemic inequalities in mental health.

Last month’s race disparity audit showed that common mental disorders such as anxiety and depression were most prevalent among black women, while black men were more than 10 times as likely to have experienced a psychotic disorder within the past year as white men.

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