Your Community

When Rameri Moukam, clinical director of Pattigift, the Birmingham-based psychiatric unit for African Caribbeans, agreed to be the first interviewee for my book, Crisis in the Community: The African Caribbean Experience of Mental Health, little did I know she would place me under scrutiny.

“Why do you want to write about this subject?” she asked. I can’t remember my exact response, though it was probably delivered with something approximating wide-eyed idealism. In hindsight, I should probably have quoted Bob Dylan who, when probed about why he wrote so many songs, retorted, “Because nobody says I can’t.”

Author David Burke

Rameri warned that I would find it difficult, that there was both a wariness and weariness among African Caribbeans, who felt they had been “researched to death” when it came to mental health. She wasn’t wrong.

The outsider

I came to this project as something of an outsider, neither a member of the African Caribbean community or a mental health professional, but as an Irishman living in Britain acutely aware of difference, of not belonging. My community carries its own historical baggage, the relative burden of which is as oppressive as that borne by African Caribbeans. There is a sense of similar roads travelled by both communities.

And the aftershocks of that colonialism are still being felt by the descendants of the colonised, none more so than African Caribbeans. Don’t take my word for it – the statistics are in the public domain, and paint a disturbing picture of disproportionate disadvantage in relation to most socio-economic factors.

44% more likely to be sectioned

What became apparent from working on Crisis in the Community is that many within the African Caribbean ethnic grouping attribute such disadvantage to racism. In that respect the experience of African Caribbeans within mental health reflects their experience in society. They are are 44% more likely to be sectioned than other ethnic groups, 29% more likely to be forcibly restrained, 50% more likely to be placed in seclusion, and make up 30% of in-patients on medium secure psychiatric wards.

Bishop Joe Aldred

The independent inquiry into the death of David ‘Rocky’ Bennett, a young Rastafarian, at the Norvic Clinic, Cambridgeshire, in 1998, concluded that services were institutionally racist, a recommendation rejected by then Health Minister John Reid as “unhelpful”. I would suggest that without acknowledgement of the cause, the effect will not be eradicated.

"A crisis that’s destroyed a generation of African Caribbeans"

As Matilda Macattram of Black Mental Health UK says, “This is a crisis that’s destroyed a generation of African Caribbeans. Look at our community. Look at the children on the streets. Look at what’s happening.

"Of all immigrant groups, look at the stage we’re in. Mental health services have done incredible amounts of damage to Black people in Britain today.”

More information

Crisis in the Community: The African Caribbean Experience of Mental Health, by Wolverhampton based author David Burke, has been published as an 'e-book'. A 'hard copy' version will be published early 2008.

Click the link on the side of this page to find out more, and to read an extract from the book >>