Angela's story breaks my heart because I saw it happen in my own inpatient program - BIPOC were treated much worse than white patients, and white women were treated the best.
I was in an inpatient program at Johns Hopkins Hospital for major depression in 2017 and my program had crossover with their eating disorder program, which was on t…
Angela's story breaks my heart because I saw it happen in my own inpatient program - BIPOC were treated much worse than white patients, and white women were treated the best.
I was in an inpatient program at Johns Hopkins Hospital for major depression in 2017 and my program had crossover with their eating disorder program, which was on the same floor, which was set up like a dormitory more than a typical hospital. As a highly educated white woman, they asked my opinions on my treatment regiment while others were taken off of medications willy-nilly (even ones that had nothing to do with mental health) and had no control over the matter. They treated one woman of color in my program really poorly and even put her in solitary confinement for a day for being "resistant". Her disagreement with them and rightful outburst over her poor treatment wasn't taken seriously and was seen as "proof" that she was crazy.
The eating disorder side was very narrowly set up to treat ultra-thin size 00 white anorexic women - one of the people I befriended who had a dual-diagnosis had trouble being recognized as having an eating disorder at all because she technically had a "healthy" BMI. If they struggled to treat size 8 anorexic white women there was no way they were going to be able to handle women of color with more complex cases, if they admitted them at all (which in my time there, no POC was in the dual program...)
Angela's story breaks my heart because I saw it happen in my own inpatient program - BIPOC were treated much worse than white patients, and white women were treated the best.
I was in an inpatient program at Johns Hopkins Hospital for major depression in 2017 and my program had crossover with their eating disorder program, which was on the same floor, which was set up like a dormitory more than a typical hospital. As a highly educated white woman, they asked my opinions on my treatment regiment while others were taken off of medications willy-nilly (even ones that had nothing to do with mental health) and had no control over the matter. They treated one woman of color in my program really poorly and even put her in solitary confinement for a day for being "resistant". Her disagreement with them and rightful outburst over her poor treatment wasn't taken seriously and was seen as "proof" that she was crazy.
The eating disorder side was very narrowly set up to treat ultra-thin size 00 white anorexic women - one of the people I befriended who had a dual-diagnosis had trouble being recognized as having an eating disorder at all because she technically had a "healthy" BMI. If they struggled to treat size 8 anorexic white women there was no way they were going to be able to handle women of color with more complex cases, if they admitted them at all (which in my time there, no POC was in the dual program...)