Like Professor Sashi Sashidharan, who accuses the psychiatric profession of failing ethnic minorities, of being culturally insensitive. Of being racist. The classic example is of a black person who is expressing himself or herself in a highly demonstrative way, using a lot of gestures, a lot of feeling and talking very loudly or loudly of what the person is expected to talk like in a European context. According to recent research by the mental health charity, Mind, black people in Britain are ten times more likely to be diagnosed as schizophrenic. They are more likely to be prescribed drugs and electric shock treatment and less likely to receive counselling and therapy.
Asian women are three times more likely to attempt suicide than their white counterparts.
Lily Ahmed who runs a mental health service for the Bangladeshi community says that such is the concern about this under, over and misdiagnosis, people are beginning to take legal action. A recent House of Commons select committee report into mental health concluded that services offered to black patients were often inappropriate or insensitive. Sometimes it seems the help arrives too late. As it did for Jacquie Forrester. Jacquie was not coping, her children were taken into care and so began her inexorable slide into mental illness.