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This chapter explores the impact of delivering culturally community family therapy with strength-based strategies, to transgenerational Black Haitian families living in Haiti and the Dominican Republic following the 2010 earthquake. A series of workshop intervention over several years, which were co-facilitated by community pastors and leaders provided a cultural-based intervention drawing on Black British and Caribbean culture, Haitian culture, Christian spiritual belief systems, in conjunction with some bi-cultural attachment and systemic methods and techniques. Community feedback through testimonies contributed to evaluation and outcomes in developing new strategies to manage stress, and family conflict and distress, together with developing new strategies in sharing a vision for the future across the community.

The hiring of women of colour faculty is not without unwritten presuppositions. The authors are expected to tolerate racism and to draw from cultural experience in catering to students of colour or when it fulfils institutional needs such as bringing ‘colour’ to all-white committees. Yet, the normative profile of university teachers demands detachment with a focus on high output in terms of students and publications. In the light of this, commitment to social justice seems to be in (certain) disagreements with mainstream interpretations of the academic profession. Women of colour professors are redefining educational leadership. This chapter addresses its effect on emotional wellbeing together with techniques and strategies to strengthen emotional resilience.

Border crossing between systemic and racial identity theories can contribute to systemic research on Black therapists work with White families.

Questionnaires were used to gather data from 29 Black, Asian and Mixed Heritage therapists in order to test the significance of variables associated with transgenerational advice, socialisation experience, professional training and therapists’ perception of successful outcomes (n=29). The study concluded that White clients were associated with the contact and disintegration statuses at the beginning of therapy, and that Black therapists were associated with being at least two racial identity statuses in advance of their White clients. In addition, results showed that there was a significant association with eye contact and White clients across all racial identity statuses in therapy, and that the therapist’s age was significantly associated with therapeutic experiences, length of therapeutic practice and the belief in working with unintentional racism in therapy. The outcome of this study will have policy implications in terms of clinical practice and supervision.

The increased and varying presence of spirituality within mental health services has assisted practitioners to consider how individual beliefs might shape behaviors, relationships, and communication patterns. Constraints arise when assumptions about the meaning and nature of the spiritual beliefs is associated with an organized religion such as Christianity, which can hinder open inclusion within clinical and supervisory practice. When there is a dominant discourse about how Christianity (and other religions) has inherent and current instances of historical abuse at the foreground, policy-makers have used this as reason to be cautious about open inclusion in practice. This chapter seeks to open a more integrated conversational space between spirituality, reflexivity, and black mental health.

Given there is a great deal of scope for transforming mental health services for Black service users there remains a plethora of possibility for joining systemic reflexivity with spirituality (Cook, Powell, & Sims, 2010). There is less discourse around the applicability of spirituality expressed within leadership and supervisory practice; however, it can play a significant role for leaders, managers, and supervisors who practice from positions of spiritual awareness, orientation, and competence. There is particular relevance for Black African-Caribbean practitioners that consider they have a history of strength-based spiritual approaches and support systems inherent within their cultural identity (Boyd-Franklin, 1989). Consideration needs to be given as to how the associated concepts of collaboration, community cohesion, and support systems might assist professionals within leadership and organizational development roles as part of addressing Black mental health service provision.

This chapter discusses the experiences of black men who encounter the phenomena of a mental health diagnosis, detention and death in a forensic setting in England. Although there are black women with mental health issues who have also died in forensic settings, the occurrence is significantly higher for men who become demonised as ‘Big, Black, Bad and dangerous’. The author discusses the historical over representation of mental ill health amongst black people in the general community and the plethora or reasons attributed to this. The author then discusses the various points of entry into the criminal justice system, where black men with mental health issues are over represented. The author explores some inquiries into the deaths of black men in custody and the recommendations that were subsequently made, which successive governments have failed to act upon. The author argues that the term ‘Institutional Racism’ is insufficient to explain this phenomenon; and offers her own theoretical interpretation which is a combination of systemic racism influenced by post-colonial conceptualisation