Article: "A working-class black man has to try 16 times harder to get a therapy appointment than a middle-class white woman"

This headline is by a blog writer, Charles Pulliam-Moore, that summarizes a research study demonstrating this dreadful statistic. From the blog: 

"Kugelmass found that, on average, therapists who were responsible for their own scheduling were much less likely to respond to black people’s requests for appointments. ...

The fact that each of the characters attempting to schedule appointments had the same type of insurance prompted Kugelmass to further hypothesize that the anti-black bias that she observed was much more serious."

This is quite distressing! As hard as it is for people to decide to seek the mental health care they need, for it to be 16 times harder to access that care based simply on your race.... is yet another reason that deconstructing and dismantling racism is so critically, urgently important to ACEs work. 

Abstract to research article (click here to read full research article):
Through a phone-based field experiment, I investigated the effect of mental help seekers’ race, class, and gender on the accessibility of psychotherapists. Three hundred and twenty psychotherapists each received voicemail messages from one black middle-class and one white middle-class help seeker, or from one black working-class and one white working-class help seeker, requesting an appointment. The results revealed an otherwise invisible form of discrimination. Middle-class help seekers had appointment offer rates almost three times higher than their working-class counterparts. Race differences emerged only among middle-class help-seekers, with blacks considerably less likely than whites to be offered an appointment. Average appointment offer rates were equivalent across gender, but women were favored over men for appointment offers in their preferred time range.