The timeliness of the topic ethnoracial disparities in mental health is an important one given the growing awareness of structural racism and ethnic discrimination that has been manifested in episodes of police violence and in disparities related to the COVID infection and death and ethnoracial disparities in that. Disparities in mental health access and service delivery have also been well documented. This webinar will address ethnoracial disparities in mental health risk, assessment and service delivery in Latinx populations. The conceptual basis of disparities will be covered first, folloed by promising topics for research on disparities in mental health, risk assessment, service access, and delivery. These topics are important for service providers to understand as the social conditions that lead to disparities affect all aspects of mental health, including neurobiology. They are often poorly measured, and if unaddressed, will continue to interfere with mental health care.

Audience: Mental health service providers working with Latinx populations

Objectives:

1.    Discuss ethnoracial disparities and contributing factors at the individual, social and structural levels.
2.    Address how worse access in services of care and outcomes have an impact on the severity, impairment, and persistence of psychopathology.
3.    Identify ways to understand and address intersectionality as it pertains to mental health outcomes.
4.    Discuss the Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) as a person-centered sociocultural assessment tool.
 

About Presenter:

Roberto Lewis Fernández, MD

Dr. Roberto Lewis-Fernández is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the New York State (NYS) Center of Excellence for Cultural Competence and the Hispanic Treatment Program, and Co-Director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic, at NYS Psychiatric Institute. He is also Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University. He led the development of the DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview, a standardized method for cultural assessment for use in mental health practice, and the Principal Investigator of its international field trial.

Dr. Lewis-Fernández was educated at Harvard College, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Medical School. He trained in psychiatry at The Cambridge Hospital (1986-90) and completed a Dupont-Warren psychiatric research fellowship (1990-91) and an NIMH-sponsored fellowship in clinically applied medical anthropology (1991-93) at Harvard Medical School. From 1993 to 1995, Dr. Lewis-Fernández worked for the Puerto Rico Health Department implementing an innovative collaborative care (physical-mental health) for rural primary care clinics.