By George Aumoithe

I’m Dr. George Aumoithe. I am an assistant professor of History and African-American Studies in the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. First of all, I’d really like to thank the Mind Brain and Behavior Institute for allowing Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes and I to co-convene across two schools this really important interdisciplinary conversation that I think is also timely and very important for us to hold.

I want to provide a little bit of framing around the professional context for our convening today. According to the Association of Black Psychologists, of 1.2 million behavioral health providers in the US in 2020 nationally, 4% of psychologists, 2% of psychiatrists, 7% of marriage and family counselors, 11% of professional counselors, and 22% of social workers are Black.

While these ratios represent a numerical improvement from the early twentieth century—the state of Black mental health representation then according to scholars like Elizabeth Lunbeck and our very own Martin Summers, who have identified only a handful of professional psychologists and psychiatrists providing care in the immediate post-war period—Black people remain underrepresented in the highest echelons of professional care.

We also need to think about certain lingering issues such as the mistreatment of patients in psychiatric wards, or the violence emanating out of encounters with police as first responders, or even the violence emerging from vigilante actors who intervene when someone is in distress as illustrated by the tragic killing of Jordan Neely by former Marine Daniel Penny after Penny placed Neely in an extended chokehold on a New York City subway.

Whether the historically poor representation of Black people in mental health professions or understanding Black people’s indigenous mental health practices and how they intersect with our spiritual practices, our symposium promises to deepen our historical and practical knowledge.

Today, we begin with Dr. Judith Weisenfeld’s research on the racialization of religious excitement and American psychiatry. Tomorrow, we hear from historians, religious, scholars, community organizers, policy experts, and mental health practitioners who will shed light on the intersection of Black religious communities and the acceptance of and stigma against mental health care.

In our dialogue, one question we might ponder as a group is: How do we seize the opportunities inherent to open dialogue and avoid the pitfalls of historic distrust between religious and mental health institutions? Throughout tonight’s talk and tomorrow’s plenary gathering, I look forward to exploring institutional accountability and identifying non-institutional practices and solutions.

But I also hope we can explore the structure around care, structures that include housing, education, and treatment. Without an awareness of this overarching structure within our discussion of the intersection between religion and mental health access, we leave with a potentially incomplete picture of the social problems that confront us.