Marketing of Whiteness in Addiction Medicine: Lessons for COVID as Co-Occurring Racialized Condition
Helena Hansen, MD, PhD
Dr. Helena Hansen, this year’s Distinguished Psychiatrist, has researched and written widely on the necessary, but insufficient, role cultural competency plays in addressing the health disparities of marginalized groups. Her research into opiate addiction treatment, HIV transmission, pharmaceutical marketing, and societal determinants of disease shows it is not just cultural and economic differences but also differences of access and circumstance that impair effective problem solving and lead to the learned helplessness sustaining these inequities. And, nowhere are the deleterious effects of these differences in circumstance and access more clearly seen than in the current pandemic’s toll on marginalized groups. In response to the need for more effective responses to the structural inequalities that sustain these problems, Dr. Hansen has developed a Structural Competency “prescription” to address these entrenched health disparities. This prescription asks physicians to develop an awareness of the social and economic realities of their patients as well as a language with which to describe and think about those realities, and better work with allied groups. In this year’s lecture, Dr. Hansen will draw from case studies and clinical research in addiction medicine to describe how a Structural Competency perspective can improve understanding and outcomes.
Dr. Hansen is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry at New York University, and a research psychiatrist at the New York State Office of Mental Health’s Nathan Kline Institute. Her work has been published in both clinical and social science journals and she is the recipient of numerous awards and grants for her work. Her book, Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Ministries, was published in 2018 by the University of California Press.
The lecture will be held as a webinar is free and open to all mental health professionals.
2 hours of CME credit
Plesee RSVP to Lela DeGolia at ldegolia@mednet.ucla.
(Photocopy from https://med.nyu.edu/faculty/helena-b-hansen)