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Institutional racism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Roland Littlewood*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2003

Mike Shooter hardly needs my support on Ian Bronks' demand (Psychiatric Bulletin, April 2003, 27, 155) for an apology and a retraction for his noting of institutional racism in psychiatry. ‘Institutional racism’ is a description of how an institutional system as a whole functions, not, as Dr Bronks argues, what is going on inside an individual practitioner's head.

Our President is to be congratulated on dealing with a depressingly still-continuing problem of disadvantage for ethnic minorities in the mental health system: increased sectioning (incidentally a most appropriate term), patient dissatisfaction, increased use of secure facilities and in some studies, higher dosages of psychoactive medication. If we are not involved with this at some level, then who? Blame the patient?

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