Racial biases in psychopathology undermine support for race conscious mental health programs

Introduction: Race-conscious mental health programs effectively address mental health inequity. However, programs require public support. This work tests whether stereotypes that conceive of Black individuals as impervious to mental illness undermine support for race-conscious mental health programs. Minimizing psychopathology's effect on Black individuals is expected to be associated with less funding support for race-conscious mental health programs. Evidence from one study with a combination of experimental and survey methods provides support for this prediction. Methods: Two hundred and thirty-two White participants (35.8% male, 62.5% female. 1.7% nonbinary; M age =37, SD=13) completed an experimental task in which they judged the psychological distress of 10 Black and 10 White male target individuals said to be grappling with psychopathology (e.g., depression, bipolar disorder). Participants then indicated funding support for established race-conscious mental health programs (e.g., cultural training for clinicians, efforts to increase the number of Black mental healthcare professionals). Results: Participants believed psychopathology would be less distressing to Black relative to White targets. Multiple regression analyses revealed that this minimization bias (i.e., judgments of Black targets’ distress relative to White targets’ distress) was associated with less support for race-conscious mental health programs. The more participants minimized Black individuals’ distress, the less they supported funding race-conscious mental health programs. Discussion: Results illustrate that being judged psychologically durable can have paradoxically negative effects on support for race-conscious mental health programming. In addition to undermining treatment judgments for individuals, minimizing psychopathology's effect on Black persons hampers funding support for race-conscious mental health programs geared at serving Black communities.