Patients of color may face obstacles when accessing mental health care, such as a lack of practitioners who share their background, cultural stigma against mental health care, or financial barriers. These hurdles to accessing care stem from “institutional discrimination, interpersonal racism, and stigma—which can all harm the psyche of people of color in places where they are not the majority,” CNN reported.
SimplePractice, an electronic health record platform serving independent mental health practitioners, held a panel on Tuesday to figure out how to lessen those burdens. The panel, which included mental health practitioners of color from across the country, found some solutions:
Increasing diversity: White psychologists made up about 80% of the psychology workforce in 2021, according to the American Psychological Association. Paul Bashea Williams, founder and owner of Washington, DC-based Hearts In Mind Counseling, found that patients were able to open up to him because of their shared background.
“I’m thinking about when a Black male client comes to me, the barrier isn’t there,” Williams said during the panel. “I’m able to share my experiences as a Black man growing up in Tennessee, growing up in New York, growing up in Maryland. I’m able to connect with someone who looks like me, who feels like me.”
This lack of representation can stem from cultural stigma against seeking mental health services, including among Asian Americans.
“When I think about getting into the mental health field and increasing representation, I think, in Asian culture, you just don’t go into mental health. It’s not seen as a viable profession or even something that’s worthwhile to pursue,” Houston-based psychologist Jenny Wang said during the discussion.
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Some of the hesitation about going into the mental health workforce comes from the lower compensation compared to other healthcare fields and the large amount of schooling needed, which can delay earning income, Wang said.
Student loan assistance: The average early-career psychiatrist graduates with $190,000 of medical school debt, while psychologists leave with $80,000 of debt, and psychiatric nurse practitioners have about $56,000 of debt, according to NYC Health + Hospitals. Like some other health systems, it uses student loan repayment programs to attract practitioners. Still, some potential mental health practitioners of color may not be able to afford the price of the needed medical degrees.
“I myself remember being at about 1,500 hours in my clinical training and almost deciding to stop because I couldn’t afford it. They weren’t paying me enough, or anything, really,” Monique Castro, founder and CEO of California-based Indigenous Circle of Wellness, said during the panel.
Another solution is to petition the federal government to make therapists eligible for public service loan forgiveness, which is available to healthcare workers at nonprofit hospitals, Moe Ari Brown, founder of Atlanta-based Transcendent Therapy and Consulting, which focuses on LGBTQ+ patients, said during the discussion.
“It’s therapists in private practice, therapists that work in all kinds of settings; this is a real issue,” Brown said. “We all have worked at least over 10 years as therapists and we could really be able to do that work without loans.”