Culture in Mind

Mental health, culture, and ethnicity.

by Ruth C. White, Ph.D.

The Mental Health Costs of Academic Success

Learning is stressful and the modern-day education stakes are high because not only does a future ride on performance but so do the bank accounts of parents and adult students. The need for anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications has trickled down from corporate executives to children in pressure-cooker elementary schools. Read More

Outside the Box

What follows are subjective views of non-conformity from some famous people who did it well, or at least did it famously.

1. It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed ~Albert Einstein.

2. Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers. ~Mignon McLaughlin Read More

The Fat Taboo

According to the most recent CDC data released in early 2012, more than one-third of Americans are obese. Among adult African American women, almost 80 percent are overweight or obese. Read More

The Whore, the Slut and the 'Good Girl'

In the last two weeks, we have lived with the reaction to Rush Limbaugh's tirade against a woman with whose views he disagreed. Read More

The Culture of Race

W.E.B. DuBois once said that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. As the twenty-first century enters its second decade the color line is sitll a problem. But now there are fancier names than racism; names like racial disproportionality and racial disparities. Read More

Lessons My Daughter Taught Me

Having children is a big experiment. A bigger experiment than anything science can conjure. The experiment is not just about how the child will turn out but also what kind of lessons we will learn about ourselves and about life in the process. Read More

Love and (Inter)marriage

According to the 2010 Census, there are 4.5 million interracial marriages in the USA, an increase of 20% since 2000. Perhaps love really knows no color. Or does it?

What does this statistic really mean? Who is marrying who?

Census categories Read More

Is Work Driving You Crazy? It's Time to Stop the Madness!

Does getting up to go to work in the morning fill you with dread? Are you counting the minutes until the weekend and then on Sunday you are dreading the Monday morning countdown?

For many people (not everyone) the workplace is a source of great stress. Just recently the head of Lloyd's Bank in the UK had to take stress leave because his health was being affected by his work. Read More

No Strings Attached Sex (NSA): Can Women Really Do It?

Disclaimer: This piece makes heterosexist assumptions in the interest of simplicity.

The social science research Read More

Midterms and Finals: Making it Through Without Falling Apart

It's that time of year again for the high school or college student.... midterms. And soon it will be finals. The well-prepared student has already started organizing and researching their final paper. They have read their comments from earlier assignments and are working on applying it to their final paper/project. Some have started studying. Read More

Happy Holidays? Why Not?

Thanksgiving has passed and the madness that is Black Friday is already a memory. One down, more to go: Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwaanzaa and let's not forget the New Year. Read More

Mental Health and the Culture of War

Today in honor of Veteran's Day I am doing a post on the impact of war on mental health and what veterans who were mentally injured in battle need to become well again. No data. No clinical definitions. Just a brief note on how war impacts mental health (and sometimes this is in response to how war impacts physical health, e.g. loss of a limb or sight etc). Read More

The Color of Mental Illness

Racism creates social conditions that puts people at risk for mental illness and once they are mentally ill, stigma and lower access to quality care reduces the likelihood of diagnosis and provides barriers to high quality care. Read More

The Culture of Mental Health

Am I crazy or am I just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Do I need medication or do I just need different cultural expectations? Am I a survivor of mental health or an ongoing 'victim'? Can we answer these questions without the framework of culture? Read More

Ruth C. White, Ph.D., M.S.W., and M.P.H., is the author of Bipolar 101 and is an associate professor of social work at Seattle University.

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About Culture in Mind

Culture in Mind will explore all the ways in which culture, broadly conceptualized, interacts with mental health. Whether that be the culture of war or the culture of work or cultural norms and values that are passed down to us through our families. There will be a special focus on race and ethnicity