Commentary: The Conspicuous Invisibility of Black Ways of Being: Missing Data in New Models of Children's Mental Health

The work of Atkins et al. (2003) and the theme of community collaboration in three different research projects is remarkably consistent, and challenges the field of evidence-based school mental health to determine if and how we can apply this theme as consistently. As a group of practitioner-scholars trying to keep ourselves from becoming alien and arrogantly irrelevant to scholar-practitioners, we must ask ourselves several questions generated by the authors. Do we as a field of scholars match the authors' level of concern for meeting the need that urban communities have for a more comprehensive level of services than evidence-based research can provide? Do we match the authors' zeal to include community members in the implementation and redirection of the intervention research projects? Are we willing to collaborate with diverse social welfare and medical health agencies to ensure families and children receive stable mental health care that can survive the other challenging realities of their lives? Dr. Atkins and his colleagues have provided a wonderful beginning to the development of models that broaden the role of community and school psychology as well as the role of intervention research in the schools. Unfortunately, this work is not easily supported by institutions of academic psychology where more control of extraneous variables, reduction of error, and increase of power is considered the hallmark of good research. Too often, community collaborative research is easier spoken than accomplished, and this commentary describes how valuable and how difficult the work of community collaboration is. The focus on teachers and parents is laudable and suggests how difficult it is to conduct interventions within schools without considering both of these constituencies. I appreciated the openness of the authors about the goals that were not reached and the reasons why. These admissions can be more meaningful than the quantitative results of evidence-based work. This work will make a wonderful contribution to the field of school-based mental health because it broadens the role of psychological intervention beyond the school context and into other relevant institutions in the lives of poor Black families. Furthermore, truly enlightening was the authors' hint at the cultural mismatch between clinical research staff and community participants. The use of community consultants represents an acknowledgement on the part of the researchers that the not-so-positive history of the community's experience with research and helping institutions is important and must not be ignored. The further integration of the community consultants, as not just guides into the communities but as eventual group facilitators, suggests that there was agreement on the need to expand the role of community consultants. Given the authors' efforts at expanding accessibility, effectiveness, and sustainability of mental health services, my primary feedback about the article will rest primarily on contributing to this expansion by suggesting one more element--visibility of the unpredictable relational elements that arises when researchers collaborate with Black folk. As such, I propose three suggestions toward making the inconspicuous culture of community participants visible. The first step is to acknowledge the unpredictability of conducting research in urban communities. The second is to acknowledge the cultural relational clashes and connections that occur between and among community participants and researchers. The third and final recommendation is to appreciate the benefits when researchers successfully persuade key informants to behave in different but increasingly successful ways. Predicting Unpredictability When the laboratory experiment does not go according to plan, the primary investigator can lose two or three years for every grant year that goes awry. However, with research focused on developing new models for children's mental health, unpredictability can be a meaningful theoretical and procedural process. …