Symposia
Culture / Ethnicity / Race
Belinda Chen, M.A.
Clinical Psychology PhD Student
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Han Du, PhD
Assistant Professor
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Joyce Lui, Ph.D.
Assistant Research Professor
University of Maryland- College Park
College Park, Maryland
Lisa Benson, PhD
Supervising Psychologist
Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health
Los Angeles, California
Yen-Jui Lin, PhD
Clinical Psychologist II
Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health
Los Angeles, California
Anna S. Lau, Ph.D.
Professor
UCLA
Los Angeles, California
In the last decade, rates of psychological crisis for racial/ethnic minority youth (REM) have increased by 500% (CDC, 2020). Simultaneously, machine learning has shown that Black patients are 2.5 times more likely than White patients to be described with stigmatizing language (e.g. resistant) in their medical records (Sun et al., 2022). While institutional racial biases have been identified within America’s criminal justice systems (Glaser, 2014), these findings suggest that emergency health services may represent additional coercive systems.
In the critical moments of a psychiatric emergency, first responder perceptions of a child’s dangerousness to self or others may determine placement of the child in involuntary restrictive care. Findings from intergroup relations and cognition literatures suggest that Black males are seen as less innocent and more responsible for their actions than their White peers (Goff et al., 2014), and that individuals’ emotional state, arousal, and unconscious stereotypes lead to automatic decisions (Kret et al., 2016; Greenwald et al., 2020). Given this considerable potential for stigma to influence the emergency encounter, understanding the perceptions of first responders is paramount for ensuring protection of rights for all youth.
This study will apply text mining to first responder notes to examine whether first responder reports captured within emergency encounters are more likely to include language around dangerousness and culpability than encounters with White youth. We will examine open-text field documentation written between 2016-2019 by first responders from Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health Mobile Crisis Response team, a service staffed by mental health personnel and law enforcement officers who triage psychiatric emergencies reported by community members. These data include 32,217 encounters with 20,785 unique children. We will implement topic modeling to identify stigmatizing language in first responder notes, conduct sentiment analysis to assess the overall valence of each note, and examine associations between and disproportionality among negative note theme and note valence as a function of youth race/ethnicity. By examining a large, diverse sample, this study advances understanding of responses to REM youth in psychiatric crisis and provides a novel model for investigating stigma that may be applied across institutions known to perpetuate inequity.