The struggle to find a therapist can be a daunting task, and connecting with someone you feel you can identify with can make it more difficult. Dr. Khadijah Booth Watkins, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds, said, “More and more people are looking for therapy and we just don’t have the supply to meet the demand.”
She knows it’s not easy for people struggling with their mental health to find help.
“People have waited for years to try to get a therapist that they can find is a match or that takes their insurance. Even here in the city, though, it can be really difficult to find someone who’s specially trained, especially if we think about child and adolescent psychiatry as child and adolescent therapists, they’re very few,” Watkins said.
When talking about therapists of color, especially Black therapists, the search gets even more challenging.
“The numbers are quite disappointing. It’s about 85-90% are not of color therapists, so around 5-6% of therapists are people of color, whether they’re Black or brown. And so that’s pretty big. If we think about what the world that we live in looks like, it doesn’t really quite match. And so it’s really hard for some people to find someone that they think can relate to them,” Watkins said.
Gabrielle Palmer, a mentorship and Leadership Program Administrator with the Center for Workforce Development at William James College said, “There’s something about sitting across a room from someone who knows your experience, who’s been in your shoes, that you don’t have to share all of the unspoken.”
“We have so many pipeline programs that are just for this to increase the accessibility and to really widen the pipeline for folks of color who want to work and in underserved communities or marginalized communities who also identify as a racial ethnic minority. And there is a power of really giving service while also being someone who looks like the ones you give service to,” Palmer said.
That’s where the Black Mental Health Graduate Academy comes in.
Read more are WCVB.com.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.