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July 28, 2020
At a moment of urgent racial reckoning, this program will explore the significance of Black mental health and ask what role it plays in the movement for Black lives. How have ideas about Black mental health and illness intersected with enduring associations between Blackness and criminality? What impact has the culture of incarceration had on the experiences of Black individuals with mental illness? How might Oregon's specific history of racial oppression and its tiny Black population contribute to the mental health challenges facing Black Oregonians right now?
Featuring Martin Summers, Department of History, Boston College; and Larissa Miller, PhD, Clinical Psychology Resident, Strong Integrated Behavioral Health, Eugene, OR.
Miller earned her doctorate in clinical child psychology from the University of Denver, where her research focused on unconscious bias and nonverbal communication. Dr. Miller provides evidence-based psychotherapy to individuals from childhood through young adulthood and is currently recruiting participants for a free support group for BIPOC youth.
Summers is a professor of history and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, where he regularly teaches courses on gender and sexuality in African American history, medicine and public health in the African diaspora, and the African diaspora and the world. Summers’ most recent book, Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s Capital, is a social and cultural history of medicine which focuses on African American patients at Saint Elizabeths Hospital, a federal mental institution in Washington, D.C., from its founding in 1855 to the 1980s.
Sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics in partnership with Eugene-Springfield NAACP, Lyllye Reynolds-Parker Black Cultural Center, and University of Oregon Division of Equity and Inclusion.