"Voices of African American Families"

This article focuses on the differences in the perception of residential treatment centers in both African American families and non-African American families. Both African American and non-African American families agreed that they would like to be more involved in the planning, decision making, and evaluation processes designated for their children. They all wanted more involvement, more initial and ongoing contact with their children, more respect, more flexible visitation and scheduling policies, and more financial support for contacts.

According to the article, African Americans only make up 12% of the population in the US, however they make up 26% of children placed in residential treatment facilities. They are grossly overrepresented, which is a huge cause for concern. African Americans had more and different concerns regarding residential treatment than did non-African Americans. They were concerned with separation of the child, including feelings of abandonment and of being discarded. They felt that children cannot be well served in residential treatment and that our society needs to redirect resources so that children can function better from their own homes. They also had concerns about medications, because of overreliance on medicines and the lack of research has been done about the effects on blacks. Another concern was the practice of cultural competence, the lack of ethnic diversity among workers, and incongruity between worker and child. Lastly, their concerns included possible stereotyping, which may lead to mistreatment and misdiagnosis.

This week at my internship, I sat in on a treatment team meeting regarding a 12-year-old African American boy. This particular youth has ongoing problems with stealing and with dishonesty, which is why the meeting was called. Many methods have been tried with this youth and nothing, including consequences, is getting through to him enough for him to change his behavior. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss any new possible courses of action that might help improve this youth's behaviors. The child's social worker, brother, foster parents, and case manager were all present at this meeting. All were African American. Possible plans that were brought up were finding a therapist for the child to talk through emotions and other issues that could possibly be the cause of these behaviors. The social worker decided that the therapist assigned to the case should be African American as well, because she thought that cultural and racial dissimilarity could hinder the child's progress. Also, having a therapist of the same race could ensure that there was no negative stereotyping based on race, and would most likely avoid issues of misdiagnosis and discriminatory treatment. A second idea that was brought up for this child, if he did not improve even after therapeutic intervention, was residential treatment. When the social worker mentioned this possibility, both the brother and the foster parents interjected saying that they completely disagreed with that idea. The brother said, "that would only provide him a further disservice, and I really don't want it to get to that point". I did not think anything of this response at the time because I agreed with him that residential treatment should be used as a very last resort. After reading this article, however, I further understand his objection. As an African American, he likely has similar concerns to the issues raised in this article, including separation from family, medications, cultural dissimilarities, and stereotyping. Although this was not delved into in our meeting, his extreme concern with the idea of residential treatment fits perfectly into the point this reading was trying to make. It would be very beneficial to do a similar study with a larger sample so that these ideas could be generalized across the population.