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The main theme of this chapter is raising awareness and improving insights and planning abilities in relation to problems faced by people of colour, as individuals and in institutions. In promoting these skills, there is a need to recognize the role played by personal perceptions and emotions in the way in which we construe problems. Here, the author presents a personal construct psychology (Kelly, 1955, Ravenette, 1997) derived approach, which offers a way through the conceptual confusion clouding our thinking about aspects of our lives that concern us, and often leaves us lacking the energy and ability to loosen our thinking and move in the direction of rewarding new attitudes and behaviours.

African American males experience acute or chronic stress from discriminatory treatment and racial microaggressions, decreasing their biopsychosocial health. Racial microaggressions include but are not limited to merciless and mundane exclusionary messages, being treated as less than fully human, and civil and human rights violations. Racial microaggressions are key to understanding increases in racial battle fatigue (Smith, 2004) resulting from the psychological and physiological stress that racially marginalized individuals/groups experience in response to specific race-related interactions between them and the surrounding dominant environment. Race-related stress taxes and exceeds available resilient coping resources for people of color, while many whites easily build sociocultural and economic environments and resources that shield them from race-based stress and threats to their racial entitlements.

What is at stake, here, is the quest for equilibrium versus disequilibrium in a society that marginalizes human beings into substandard racial groups. Identifying and counteracting the biopsychosocial and behavioral consequences of actual or perceived racism, gendered racism, and racial battle fatigue is a premier challenge of the twenty-first century. The term “racial microaggressions” was introduced in the 1970s to help psychiatrists and psychologists understand the enormity and complications of the subtle but constant racial blows faced by African Americans. Today, racial microaggressions continue to contribute to the negative experiences of African American boys and men in schools, at work, and in society. This chapter will focus on the definition, identification, and long-term effects of racial microaggressions and the resultant racial battle fatigue in anti-black misandric environments.

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.

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

An overview of the impact of dementia that focuses on underdeveloped countries across the globe, and migrant and minority ethnic communities within the developed world. Increased longevity increases the risk of dementia and brings new challenges in terms of cultural perspectives and cultural obligations in the care of elders. The chapter examines these challenges in detail and their consequences in planning for support and care.

A vast amount of educational literature has repeatedly documented the overrepresentation of African American male students in exclusionary school punishment. However, amid the wealth of data and statistics on the topic, a viable theoretical explanation, that helps to make sense of the disproportionately high number of suspensions for Black males, remains relatively absent. Drawing upon the Method of Theory Triangulation, this chapter uses three conceptual frames to develop a plausible, causal narrative for deconstructing how pose, perception, and threat converge create a perfect storm of conditions that perpetuate discriminatory discipline practices. Based on the theoretical considerations implicit in this account, practical recommendations are offered to educational stakeholders who might be interested in improving school discipline practices and reducing the number of Black males disproportionately targeted for disciplinary action.