Distinguished Psychiatrist Speaker Series (DPSS) 2021

Beverly J. Stoute, MD,
will be presenting
How Our Mind Becomes Racialized Across the Developmental Cycle: Does the Black White Binary Define Us?

Description of Presentation:
The cross-cultural dynamics of racial ethnic socialization has been a growing area of research inquiry.  The rare developmental and psychoanalytic integration presented here of recent decades of research findings permit a unique theoretical formulation of how individual and group subjectivities become racialized across the developmental cycle.

Differences in the social construction of Black and white subjectivity impact the therapeutic encounter, but how do we come to understand these differences? How does our mind become racialized? A fundamental understanding of racial ethnic socialization and racial learning, with attention to racial identity formation and the vicissitudes of racial trauma across the developmental spectrum is necessary in a multicultural society, and especially crucial when treating children, adolescents or adults of color. Clinical case examples will highlight the factors that facilitate or thwart therapeutic engagement of patients of varying ethnic backgrounds on issues of race and ethnicity across the developmental cycle. As mental health clinicians we must challenge ourselves, to learn to recognize how our implicit racial attitudes impact our work and infiltrate the therapeutic encounter. Such work, if effectively done, not only produces better health care outcomes, but can be transformative for the individual patients we work with, for us as clinicians, and advance us all, if we dare hope, as a society towards the humanitarian goal of achieving racial understanding in our troubled world.

Accreditation: The Psychiatric Clinical Faculty Association (PCFA) is accredited by the California Medical Association (CMA) to provide continuing medical education for physicians. This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the CMA. PCFA designates this activity for a maximum of 2 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Dr. Stoute's lecture is free and open to all mental health professionals but registration is required. Please follow this link to register.

Target Audience: Clinicians of all back grounds (psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, mental health counselors), graduate students and scholars in the humanities and critical race theory, teachers and community mental health clinicians.

Objectives: 
1. Participants will be able to identify nodal points in the evolution of race awareness and the development of racialized thinking from childhood through adolescence into adulthood.

2.  Participants will be able to identify subtle ways that developmental differences in racial and ethnic socialization for whites versus people of color impact the therapeutic relationship.

3. Participants will be able to identify the developmental factors that impact the clinician’s ability or inability to recognize and discuss race and racial dynamics in the clinical situation.

Videos of past DPSS events can be found here.