Published in Psychiatric Services: Rethinking Racial Trauma in Black Men
I am pleased to share that my article, “Improving Psychiatric Care for Black Men Experiencing Racial Trauma,” has been published in Psychiatric Services, a journal of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
This publication is especially meaningful because Psychiatric Services is a leading journal in mental health services, health policy, and public mental health. It is also the highest-ranked mental health journal in both the Health Policy & Services category and the Public, Environmental, and Occupational Health category.
The article builds on the framework I developed in Black Men and Racial Trauma and applies it to psychiatric care, diagnosis, documentation, treatment planning, and service delivery.
The central argument is that structural violence is not simply background context. It functions as a psychiatric exposure.
This matters because psychiatry has not always been open to structural explanations of distress. The field has often been organized around individual diagnosis, symptom classification, risk assessment, and pathology-based interpretation. Even when structural racism or social determinants are acknowledged, they are often treated as context rather than mechanisms that shape clinical presentation, diagnostic trajectories, documentation, and engagement with care.
For Black men, that distinction matters.
Black men do not enter clinical spaces as isolated individuals detached from the institutions that have shaped their lives. They enter with histories of being surveilled, misread, disciplined, excluded, threatened, and treated as dangerous. They enter systems that often claim neutrality while carrying assumptions about Black male emotion, anger, guardedness, and risk.
Too often, adaptive responses to structural harm are misread as individual pathology. Hypervigilance may be interpreted as paranoia. Guardedness may be interpreted as resistance. Anger may be interpreted as aggression. Emotional shutdown may be interpreted as poor emotion engagement.
The article also addresses anti-Black misandry, a form of gendered racism that constructs Black men as threatening, emotionally deficient, or predisposed to volatility. This framework is necessary because Black men are not only racialized. They are racialized as men, and that matters clinically. The same emotional expression that might be interpreted as distress in one patient may be interpreted as danger in a Black male patient.
This does not mean clinicians should ignore symptoms, risk, diagnosis, or treatment planning. It means those processes must be more accurate.
A structural analysis does not replace clinical judgment. It strengthens it by asking clinicians to consider what has happened to the person, what institutions have done, and how those experiences shape presentation.
The article asks psychiatry and mental health systems to take seriously questions such as:
What has this person had to survive?
How have institutions shaped his sense of safety?
How might mistrust be adaptive rather than oppositional?
How might documentation reproduce the same distortions that brought him into care?
What would treatment look like if structural harm were part of the formulation rather than an afterthought?
The article argues that psychiatric systems need to do more than acknowledge racism in abstract terms. They must change how they assess, diagnose, document, and respond to Black men’s distress.
This includes integrating structural exposure into diagnostic formulation, screening for institutional and criminal legal system involvement, reducing diagnostic misrecognition and documentation bias, strengthening continuity and trust-building practices, applying structural analysis in clinical training, and aligning quality metrics with equity and safety outcomes.
My concern is not simply that psychiatry has neglected Black men. It is that psychiatric systems have often misunderstood the terms of their suffering.
This publication represents one effort to move Black men’s racial trauma into mainstream psychiatric and public mental health conversations without reducing it to individual deficit or pathology.
Black men deserve care that can recognize the difference between pathology and survival.
The article is available here: Improving Psychiatric Care for Black Men Experiencing Racial Trauma.
If you do not have access and would like to read the article, feel free to contact me through my website at yamontecooper.com.