From a Psych Hospital to Harvard Law: One Black Woman’s Journey With Bipolar Disorder

Krista L. R. Cezair

Ms. Magazine

Originally posted 22 Feb 24

Here is an excerpt:

In the spring of 2018, I was so sick that I simply couldn’t consider my future performance on the bar exam. I desperately needed help. I had very little insight into my condition and had to be involuntarily hospitalized twice. I also had to make the decision of which law school to attend between trips to the psych ward while ragingly manic. I relied on my mother and a former professor who essentially told me I would be attending Harvard. Knowing my reduced capacity for decision‐making while manic, I did not put up a fight and informed Harvard that I would be attending. The next question was: When? Everyone in my community supported me in my decision to defer law school for a year to give myself time to recover—but would Harvard do the same?

Luckily, the answer was yes, and that fall, the fall of 2018, as my admitted class began school, I was admitted to the hospital again, for bipolar depression this time.

While there, I roomed with a sweet young woman of color who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and PTSD and was pregnant with her second child. She was unhoused and had nowhere to go should she be discharged from the hospital, which the hospital threatened to do because she refused medication. She worried that the drugs would harm her unborn child. She was out of options, and the hospital was firm. She was released before me. I wondered where she would go. She had expressed to me multiple times that she had nowhere to go, not her parents’ house, not the child’s father’s house, nowhere.

It was then that I decided I had to fight—for her and for myself. I had access to resources she couldn’t dream of, least of all shelter and a support system. I had to use these resources to get better and embark on a career that would make life better for people like her, like us.

After getting out of the hospital, I started to improve, and I could tell the depression was lifting. Unfortunately, a rockier rock bottom lay ahead of me as I started to feel too good, and the depression lifted too high. Recovery is not linear, and it seemed I was manic again.

The info is here.

Here are some thoughts:

In this powerful piece, Krista L. R. Cezair candidly shares her journey navigating bipolar disorder while achieving remarkable academic and professional success. She begins by describing her history of depression and suicidal thoughts, highlighting the pivotal moment of diagnosis and the challenges within mental health care facilities, particularly for marginalized groups. Cezair eloquently connects her personal experience with broader issues of systemic bias and lack of understanding around mental health, especially within prestigious institutions like Harvard Law School. Her article advocates for destigmatizing mental health struggles and recognizing the resilience and contributions of those living with mental illness.

Black Bioethics in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Ray, K., Fletcher, F.E., Martschenko, D.O. et al. 

J Med Humanit (2023).

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09783-4

Here are two excerpts:

Lessons Black Bioethics can take from BLM

BLM showed that telling Black people’s stories or giving them a space to tell their own stories is viewed as an inherently political act simply because Black people’s existence is viewed as political. At the same time, it taught us that we absolutely must take on this task because, if we do not tell our stories, other people will tell them for us and use our stories to deny us our rightful moral status and all the rights it entitles us.

BLM let Black people’s stories fuel its social justice initiatives. It used stories to put Black people at the forefront of protests and social inclusion efforts to show the extent to which Black people had been excluded from our collective social consciousness. Stories allowed us to see the total impact of anti-Black racism and the ways it infiltrates all parts of Black life. And for those who were far removed from the experience of being Black, BLM used stories to make us care about racial injustice and be so moved that we were unable to turn our backs on Black people’s suffering. In this way, stories are an act of rebellion, a way to force people to reckon with BLM’s demands that Black people ought to be treated like the full and complex human beings we are.

Black Bioethics is also a rebellion. It is a rebellion against the status quo in bioethics—a rebellion against Black people’s lives being an afterthought, particularly in issues of justice. Stories aid in this rebellion. Just as stories helped BLM show the full range of Black people’s humanity and the ways that individuals and institutions deny Black people that humanity, stories help Black Bioethics demonstrate just how our institutions contribute to Black people’s poor health and prevent them from living full lives. In Black Bioethics, stories can create the same emotional stirring that they did for BLM supporters since they share many of the same challenges and goals. And just as it would be imprudent to underestimate the role of stories in social justice, it would be imprudent of us to underestimate what stories can do for our sense of health justice for Black people.

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Toward an intersectional bioethics

Bioethics is well-positioned to foster antiracism in scholarship, training, and advocacy (Danis et al. 2016). Although the field focuses on ethical issues in biomedical research and clinical care specifically, Danis et al. (2016) point out that many ethical dilemmas that impact health and well-being lie outside of healthcare settings. For instance, there are significant ethical dilemmas posed by the social determinants of health and complex disease. Social factors such as poverty, unequal access to healthcare, lack of education, stigma, and racism are underlying and contributing factors to health inequalities. These inequalities, in turn, generate the ethical dilemmas that bioethics grapples with (Danis et al. 2016). If the field genuinely values the just conduct of biomedical research and the just provision of clinical care, then it will need to draw upon intersectionality to understand and effectively analyze the many interlocking complexities in our world and in human experiences. Social activist movements like BLM and their use of intersectionality offer several lessons to those in the field working to secure justice in biomedicine, clinical care, and society.

First, as an analytic tool, intersectionality recognizes and understands that different social forces conjoin to produce and maintain privilege and marginalization. Therefore, intersectionality clarifies instances in which real lives and experiences are being erased. Bioethics cannot afford to “neglect entire ways of being in the world,” though it has and continues to do so (Wallace 2022, S79). Social activist movements like BLM are drawing attention to ways of being that are unjust yet largely ignored by mainstream hegemonic interests. For instance, BLM directly acknowledges within its movement “those who have been marginalized within [other] Black liberation movements” (Black Lives Matter n.d.). Using intersectionality, BLM heightens awareness of the ways in which Black queer and trans individuals, undocumented individuals, and people with disabilities have different experiences with White supremacy and advance colonialism. In doing so, it centers rather than erases real lives and experiences. Learning from this movement, bioethical scholarship grounded in the principle of justice will need to find ways to center the experiences of Black-identifying individuals without treating the Black community as a homogenous entity.

The info is here.

Intersectional implicit bias: Evidence for asymmetrically compounding bias and the predominance of target gender

Connor, P., Weeks, M., et al. (2023).

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

124(1), 22–48.

https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000314

Abstract

Little is known about implicit evaluations of complex, multiply categorizable social targets. Across five studies (N = 5,204), we investigated implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age. Overall, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was pro-women/anti-men bias, followed by smaller but nonetheless consistent pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class biases. By contrast, we observed less consistent effects of targets’ race, no effects of targets’ age, and no consistent interactions between target-level categories. An integrative data analysis highlighted a number of moderating factors, but a stable pro-women/anti-men and pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class bias across demographic groups. Overall, these results suggest that implicit biases compound across multiple categories asymmetrically, with a dominant category (here, gender) largely driving evaluations, and ancillary categories (here, social class and race) exerting relatively smaller additional effects. We discuss potential implications of this work for understanding how implicit biases operate in real-world social settings. 

General Discussion

Implicit bias is central to the study of social cognition. Given that people are multiply categorizable, understanding the influences of such intersectionality upon implicit bias is likely to be vital for understanding its effects in everyday social contexts. In the present research, we examined implicit evaluations of multiply categorizable social targets, testing two competing theories about intersectional intergroup bias. We also developed and tested the reliability of a novel method of measuring and modelling implicit bias at the level of individual targets.

In Study 1 we observed implicit evaluations of Black and White males to be driven solely by targets' social class with bias favoring upper-class over lower-class targets. In Study 2, we measured implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age, and found results to be primarily driven by a specific positive bias favoring upper-class female targets. In Study 3, we used similarly intersectional targets, and explored the impact of portraying targets in full-body versus upper body photographs on implicit evaluations. Here, we observed effects of targets’ race, with Asian and White targets evaluated more positively than Black targets, and of targets’ social class, with upper-class targets evaluated more positively than lower-class targets (though only when targets were displayed in full-body presentation). Most striking, however, was the dominant effect of target gender, with positive/negative evaluations of female/male targets accounting for the majority of variance in implicit bias.

In Study 4 we tested the generalizability of these results by recruiting representative samples of US adults, and measuring implicit evaluations not just via ST-IATs, but also via EPTs and AMPs. Across all measures, we observed target gender to be the largest driver of implicit evaluations, though its dominance was less pronounced in EPTs and AMPs than in ST-IATs. We also again observed effects of targets’ social class and race, though the effect of race was inconsistent across tasks, with participants displaying anti-Black bias in the ST-IAT, pro-Asian bias in the EPT, and anti-White bias in the AMP. Finally, in Study 5 we conducted an integrative data analysis to test a number of potential moderating factors. Results showed that while all groups of participants displayed pro-female implicit gender bias and pro-upper-class implicit social class bias, both biases were stronger among women than men. Results also showed the effect of race varied across racial groups, with Asians displaying a preference for Asian over White and Black targets, Black participants displaying a preference for Asian and Black targets over White targets, Latinos displaying a preference for Asian over Black targets, and Whites displaying no significant racial bias.

A pdf of the research is here.

Through the Looking Glass: A Lens-Based Account of Intersectional Stereotyping

Petsko, C.D., Rosette, A.S. &

Bodenhausen, C.V. (2022)

Preprint

Journal of Personality & Social Psychology

Abstract

A growing body of scholarship documents the intersectional nature of social stereotyping, with stereotype content being shaped by a target person’s multiple social identities. However, conflicting findings in this literature highlight the need for a broader theoretical integration. For example, although there are contexts in which perceivers stereotype gay Black men and heterosexual Black men in very different ways, so too are there contexts in which perceivers stereotype these men in very similar ways. We develop and test an explanation for contradictory findings of this sort. In particular, we argue that perceivers have a repertoire of lenses in their minds—identity-specific schemas for categorizing others—and that characteristics of the perceiver and the social context determine which one of these lenses will be used to organize social perception. Perceivers who are using the lens of race, for example, are expected to attend to targets’ racial identities so strongly that they barely attend, in these moments, to targets’ other identities (e.g., their sexual orientations). Across six experiments, we show (1) that perceivers tend to use just one lens at a time when thinking about others, (2) that the lenses perceivers use can be singular and simplistic (e.g., the lens of gender by itself) or intersectional and complex (e.g., a race-by-gender lens, specifically), and (3) that different lenses can prescribe categorically distinct sets of stereotypes that perceivers use as frameworks for thinking about others. This lens-based account can resolve apparent contradictions in the literature on intersectional stereotyping, and it can likewise be used to generate novel hypotheses.

Lens Socialization and Acquisition

We have argued that perceivers use lenses primarily for epistemic purposes. Without lenses, the social world is perceptually ambiguous. With lenses, the social world is made perceptually clear. But how do people acquire lenses in the first place? And why are some lenses more frequently employed within a given culture than others? Reasonable answers to these questions come from developmental intergroup theory (Bigler & Liben, 2006, 2007). According to this perspective, children are motivated to understand their social worlds, and as a result, they actively seek to determine which bases for classifying people are important. One way in which children learn which bases of classification—or in our parlance, which lenses—are important is through their socialization experiences (Bigler et al., 2001; Gelman & Heyman, 1999). For example, educators in the U.S. often use language that explicitly references students’ gender groups (e.g., as when teachers say “good morning, boys and girls”), which reinforces children’s belief that the lens of gender is relevant toward the end of understanding who’s who (Bem, 1983). Another way in which people acquire lenses is through interaction with norms, laws, and institutions that, even if not explicitly referencing group divisions, nevertheless suggest that certain group divisions matter more than others (Allport, 1954; Bigler & Liben, 2007). For example, most neighborhoods in the United States are heavily segregated according to race and social class (e.g., Lichter et al., 2015; 2017). Such de facto segregation sends the message to children (and adults) that race and social class—and perhaps even their intersection—are relevant lenses for the purposes of understanding and making predictions about other people (e.g., Bonam et al., 2017). These processes, a broad mixture of socialization experiences and inductive reasoning about which group distinctions matter, are thought to give rise to lens acquisition.

The research is here.