NEW YORK, July 9, 2020 — The McSilver Institute’s Executive Director Dr. Michael A. Lindsey joined a virtual town hall hosted by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, titled “Supporting Mental Health in Communities of Color: Ways Forward.”
Video Recording
During the discussion, Dr. Lindsey touched on how signs of mental health distress are overlooked in Black children and teens, and approached as discipline problems. “Black and brown kids are over-suspended and expelled from schools, in large part because of implicit biases. Oftentimes it’s also the case that in communities of color there is no school mental health professional in the building to offer any kind of behavioral health supports to kids, and so the response has been… to have an orientation towards discipline and punitive responding.”
Other participants in the virtual town hall included psychologist Dr. Alfiee Breland-Noble and Fred Sandoval, who is Executive Director of the National Latino Behavioral Health Association. The AFSP’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Christine Moutier moderated the discussion. Watch the video above.