UK “WORSE THAN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA” FOR MENTAL HEALTH

15-12-2007

It’s been claimed that black psychiatric patients get worse treatment in Britain than in apartheid era South Africa. A new book by Wolverhampton writer David Burke delves into the African-Caribbean experience of mental health.

Britain may like to regard itself as some kind of multicultural idyll, a template for the co-existence of different ethnicities within the same national boundary.

Look around the rest of Europe and witness the rise of far right extremism in Russia and the former Soviet states, groups violently opposed to integration, fiercely protective of indigenous identity; witness the intolerance towards minorities in Spain and Italy, and celebrate Britishness, its innate decency, its inclusiveness.

This, at least, is the predominantly White perspective. The African Caribbean perspective is more cynical.

“Most White people feel they’re innately superior to Black people. If you’re Black, no matter what it is you do, you’re just a Black person, and you’re nothing,” says Rameri Moukam, Clinical Director of Pattigift, a psychiatric unit for African Caribbeans based in Birmingham.

Bishop Joe Aldred, Chair of the Council of Black-Led Churches, also refutes the mother country’s supposed embrace of diversity.

“It would be nice if we could just recognise that Europeans have a view of Black people, and Black people have an experience of living amongst Europeans, the result of which is called institutional racism.

“Services are developed and administered in a way that is not sympathetic towards Black people; and Black people’s experience of trying to access those services is always fraught with difficulty.”

African Caribbeans have been the subject of study after study (“Black people are researched to death”, according to Moukam) which have consistently exposed inequalities in education, housing, employment and health, yet still there has been no discernible change.

But it is the area of mental health which is of particular concern to many African Caribbeans, and the focus for my book, Crisis in the Community: The African Caribbean Experience of Mental Health (Chipmunka Publishing).

The Department of Health’s five-year action plan, Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health, was the Government response to recommendations made by the independent inquiry into the death of David ‘Rocky’ Bennett, a 38-year-old African Caribbean inpatient at a medium secure psychiatric unit in Norwich.

One of the key components of the plan is Count Me In, a national yearly census of inpatients in mental health hospitals and facilities in England and Wales.

The findings of the initial census in 2005 revealed that African Caribbeans were three times more likely than other ethnic groups to be admitted to psychiatric hospital, 44% more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act, twice as likely to be referred through the criminal justice system, 50% more likely to be placed in seclusion in hospital, and 29% more likely to experience incidents involving physical restraint.

Furthermore, they were 70% less likely to be referred by a GP for counselling and other non-institutional rehabilitation treatments.

Matilda Macattram of Black Mental Health UK claims, “This is a crisis that’s destroyed a generation of African Caribbeans. Look at our community. Look at the children on the streets. Look at what’s happening.

“Of all immigrant groups, look at the state we’re in. Mental health services have done incredible amounts of damage to Black people in Britain today.”

Lee Jasper, Chair of the African Caribbean Mental Health Commission and London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s race adviser, compares the figures “with the mental health system in South Africa during apartheid”.

Dr Roi Kwabena, former Birmingham Poet Laureate and now a cultural anthropologist, describes African Caribbeans in Britain as “the most traumatised people on the planet”.

And Maxie Hayles, Chairman of the Birmingham Racial Attacks Monitoring Unit accuses the Government of conducting a conspiracy against African Caribbeans, adding, “What else would stop people from seeing the reality of injustice? They don’t want to admit it. They’re not meaningful. They pay lip service. They’ve lost the will to improve the lives of Black people in this country.”

Crisis in the Community combines the opinions of African Caribbean mental health professionals and the stories of service users in attempting to answer the following questions:

Kwame McKenzie, Professor of Mental Health and Psychiatry at the University of Central Lancashire and Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry at University College London, offers a succinct response to all three inquiries.

His theory is that socio-economics and racism impact drastically on the mental health of African Caribbeans; that fear of mental services inhibit African Caribbeans when it comes to engagement with these services; and that the unadaptable nature of the services offered, along with institutional racism, compound rather than cure mental illness among African Caribbean service users.

It is, he suggests, hard-boiled economics that will ultimately force a rethink on mental health strategy.

“I think it will eventually dawn on the Government that it’s cheaper to do it properly. By about 2030 or 2040, the majority of the working population in London will be from ethnic minorities. The powerhouse of the economy of the UK will be ethnic minority workers in London.

“Now you have a choice of people being ill and getting bad treatment, and therefore becoming economically inactive, or people getting ill and getting good treatment and staying economically activity. The latter is the cheaper thing to do.”

Crisis in the Community: The African Caribbean Experience of Mental Health is available as an e-book from www.chipmunkapublishing.com. It will be published in paperback in Spring 2008.