Roma children and state intervention

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In the past week, a story was reported in the news whereby a blonde, blue-eyed young girl living with Roma parents in a Roma community in Greece was noticed by authorities as looking markedly different from her parents. This difference in physical appearance led to an investigation whereby the child was determined via DNA tests to be biologically unrelated to the adults/parents caring for her.

What followed in the media was an eruption of prejudicial and unexamined assumptions about phenotypic similarity between parent and child. The prevailing theory seemed to be that the Roma parents had kidnapped the child from presumably similar-looking parents — a theory that has deep roots in prejudice and myth about the Roma people (aka Gypsies). As of today, the story appears to be more complicated than what authorities originally theorized. Although still early, it appears that the child’s biological Roma parents may have voluntarily given her up for adoption, although questions about what that means and whether payment was involved remain unanswered. Hopefully, these issues will be investigated and a resolution will be found.

As we move forward, however, it is worth examining the uproar surrounding the case. In particular, the assumptions about parental-child physical similarity and the rights of authorities to forcibly investigate “obvious” differences are chilling. Indeed, the increasing number of mixed-heritage families, some of whom we discussed in a recent post, will inevitably increase the numbers of children who look markedly different from their parents. This case, however it turns out, will be deeply unsettling to many of these families. A recent NPR article discussed some of these ideas.

Indeed, these concerns are not theoretical, as the uproar appears to have contributed to at least one other case in which authorities in Ireland removed a child from the home of a Roma family b/c of inconsistencies in physical appearance (the child was blonde and the parents were not). In the latter case, DNA tests showed that the physically different looking family was indeed biologically related, and the authorities sheepishly returned the child to the family. Apparently, this is not an isolated case.

 

 

Boston College Diversity Challenge

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Boston College’s Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture just wrapped up its 13th annual Diversity Challenge, a conference devoted to the exploration of race and culture. This year’s conference focused on the intersection between race/culture and health/mental health. There were lively presentations, interesting dialogue, and challenging conversations. Our lab was well-represented this year, as Oswaldo Moreno gave an interesting presentation on some of our work on Latino men. He highlighted how our findings suggest that the expression of depression among Latino men has both standard (i.e., cognitive, affective, and physical) and culturally-salient (specific?) aspects. The culturally-salient aspects he explored included expressions of nostalgia for one’s country of origin, disillusionment with life in the U.S., and anger at unfair treatment.

I was invited to give a talk (BC Diversity Challenge 2013), and I chose to highlight limitations in current research on mental healthcare disparities, which include an overrepresentation of between-groups research, inattention to how experiences of distress are intricately related to treatment seeking, and a dearth of research on theoretically-guided psychological variables. These limitations play a part in society’s inability to successfully reduce these persistent disparities. I then presented some of our qualitative and quantitative findings from our Latino men’s study on treatment-seeking for depression, highlighting our growing support for our culture-, gender, and class-based model of treatment-seeking. Great experience all around!

Psychotherapy in the news

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The New York Times recently published two opinion pieces on psychotherapy. The first, written by Dr. Brandon Gaudiano of Brown University Medical School, laments the lack of attention that psychotherapy receives by researchers, clinicians, media, and the general public as compared to that of pharmacotherapy. This is a shame, Dr. Gaudiano notes, because most of the existing research has documented effects equivalent to (or in some cases better than) medication. An added benefit is that there are generally no side effects associated with psychotherapy. And so, Dr. Gaudiano concludes that the reason that the mountain of evidence documenting the effectiveness of psychotherapy for mental illness has not more well known is that (a) the pharmacological industry has lobbied hard in support of phamacotherapy, and (b) the American Psychological Association has not.

In many ways, this conceptualization of the problem is well considered. But it does miss a few important self-inflicted wounds created by the psychotherapy field. In particular, the vast array of psychological approaches (some of which have dubious evidence bases) makes psychotherapy a much more convoluted field for patients to navigate. This has been changing in the past 15 years, with the publication of lists of “empirically supported treatments,” but this movement has experienced considerable backlash and resistance from proponents of treatments not on this list. No matter how this debate unfolds, the public still has little guidance regarding how to identify a therapist whose theoretical orientation would work well for that problem. The continued move to online information may help in this regard, but to date, this is not an easy process.

Then, there are other ways that the psychotherapy field continues to create problems for itself. Read this article about the shrinking psychotherapy hour…