Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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Health care org creates center for racial trauma: Better care, education, or something else?5/24/2024
CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Javeed Sukhera, M.D., Ph.D., chair of psychiatry at Institute of Living, founding director of the center Source: Hartford HealthCare press release Read time: 2.7 minutes plus short video This Happened Claiming to be the first of its kind, on April 23, 2024, Hartford HealthCare (Connecticut) announced the opening of its Center for Research in Racial Trauma and Community Healing. Who Did This? The center’s founder is child and adolescent psychiatrist Javeed Sukhera, MD, PhD, who is the chair of psychiatry at the Institute of Living at Hartford HealthCare. His publications focus on recognizing bias, stigma, and microaggressions in health care settings. He is a past Diversity Leadership Fellow with the American Psychiatric Association. Serving on the Police Services Board for the London, Ontario police force from 2018-2021, he led the Board’s anti-racism efforts and trauma-informed policy reform. He and collaborators have created “transformative learning theory” as a model for inserting implicit bias training into the education of health professionals [1]. The Hartford HealthCare system also houses a Center for Equity with progressive views that it is wrong to misgender someone and that puberty blockers have saved lives of transgender children by preventing suicide. The Premise Current projects already underway at the Center of Racial Trauma include: 1. A culturally affirming parent support group for Black and African American parents. 2. A study of mistrust and discrimination in reproductive care in partnership with UConn Health. 3. Tapping artificial intelligence to analyze stigmatizing and biased language in electronic health records in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Center’s future mission, according to its website, is to provide (1) Research on how racial trauma affects individuals and communities, (2) Education to train mental health professionals, improve equity, and reduce bias, and (3) Community Engagement through youth programs, mentorship, and mental health services. The Center’s staff consists of the chair of psychiatry (Sukhera) and one research associate with a master’s degree in health administration. They did not state what outcomes would be measured to gauge the success of the Institute. They did not announce new projects, training programs, or services. Analysis If the intent is better care, there is no prior empirical evidence that it can create better outcomes of care, as this center is the first of its kind. Since Dr. Sukhera has never received NIH research funding and has never first-authored a controlled research experiment, it is not clear who is going to conduct the research to produce better outcomes. If the intent is education for the community, the terminology may lead to confusion. Despite the attention-grabbing assertion that “racial trauma” exists, this construct is not trauma by the traditional definition used in psychiatry. Traumatic experiences are defined as life-threatening, and they are typically sudden, unexpected discrete events that create a sense of fear and panic. In contrast, racial trauma seems synonymous with racial discrimination, which are chronic experiences that are either known and expected or covert. Racial trauma is one of a host of non-life-threatening stressors that scholar activists have been trying to elevate into traumas for ideological motivations. Others include historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, climate trauma, complex trauma, developmental trauma, and a dozen or more experiences from the adverse childhood experiences studies. Why Is This Happening? The main driving force seems to be the arrival of Dr. Sukhera in 2021, who describes himself a “scholar activist” [2}. He appears to be one of the breed of medical professionals and academic professors who have shed most pretense of equipoise and aggressively advocate for progressive leftist causes under the guise of extraordinary caring. In this short video of him discussing the new center, he describes that the new center will acknowledge the pain of racial trauma and that it is real. Besides acknowledging, however, it’s still a bit vague what the center will do [3]. Dr. Sukhera’s posts on X (formerly Twitter), interviews, and articles provide steady representations of the progressive liberal ideology including DEI, gender-affirming care, gun control, implicit bias, and a belief that medicine is systemically racist. His social media posts emphasize how deeply he feels human suffering. In a post from 3/9/2023, he thinks people who want to ban gender affirming care are deliberately cruel (3/9/23). In another from 11/7/2023: “If you hurt I hurt. If you’re afraid—I am here to have your back…We must be hypervigilant in protection of one another’s safety.” If the intent is something besides legitimate hopes for better care or accurate education, this type of strategy has been seen before. Communities have tried to leverage racial sensitivity before to alleviate racial tensions, prevent crime, and provide the appearance that something significant is being done. Philadelphia initiated a transformation of the city’s mental health services into a trauma-informed system in 2005 to address high unemployment and murder rates. Baltimore responded to riots in 2015 with a trauma-informed series of transformations for mental health services [4]. Violent crime in both cities remain well above the national average, and crime in general has increased. REFERENCES [1] Sukhera, Javeed; Watling, Christopher J.; and Gonzalez, Cristina M., "Implicit Bias in Health Professions: From Recognition to Transformation" (2020). Paediatrics Publications. 2052. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/paedpub/2052 [2] Conversations on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with the Medical Director Institute (March 31, 2023). National Council for Mental Wellbeing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljmTU7Lt90M [3] News 8 WTNH.com (April 23, 2024). https://www.wtnh.com/news/health/hartford-healthcare-launches-new-research-center-that-focuses-on-racial-trauma/ [4] The genesis of both city efforts described in Michael S. Scheeringa (2021), The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Comments are closed.
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