Burke's work has included writing on changing attitudes towards black people and mental health, research on the role of racial discrimination in psychiatric disorders, and how racism can lead to mental illness. At an oral history seminar in 1981, organised by Lambeth Community Relations Council, Burke stated: "If you are black, and working class, there are much greater chances of being compulsorily admitted to hospital under a section of the Mental Health Act, going to a special hospital and sometimes being repatriated." In April of that year, following the Brixton riots, he co-founded "The Ethnic Study Group", which dismissed diagnoses of "Balham psychosis, New Cross psychosis, West Indian psychosis and Migration psychosis".