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Are you a Lived Experience Practitioner (LXP)? (Mad) Academic? Student? Clinician? Service User? Carer? Come and join us - Mad Studies is for everyone :-) Mad Studies Birmingham is passionate about Mad Knowledge & Mad Literature. October is Black History Month in the UK, and this month Mad Studies Birmingham is discussing a paper which has considered Black people's historical experience of therapy to inform future development of therapy. Black communities are so often forgotten about and treatments often designed by people whose experience of being White and middle class is the norm. The therapies themselves, whilst not overtly designed with certain ethnic groups in mind, often attract a demographic which mirrors that of the people who have developed those therapeutic interventions. In previous discussions, the unmet need for Black communities accessing services, having needs understood in the context of racialised trauma and therapeutic interventions designed without addressing the different needs of Black service users has often been discussed. Hot off the press is 'An Evidence-Based Approach for Treating Stress and Trauma due to Racism', authored by Monica Williams, Samantha Holmes, Manzar Zare, Angela Heavy & Sonya Faber which acknowledges that this form of mental distress is not acknowledged within the DSM-5 and proposes an evidence approached way of working with people who have experienced this. Whilst the paper does not explicitly state that any authors are mental health service users, the authors include Black researchers who have personal experience of living with individual and systemic racism. This will create space for an interesting conversation: how do Black service users feel about this approach? Is it a better fit for their needs? Can wider services learn improved ways of developing future services to meet the needs of people from Black, Brown and other marginalised ethnic groups? The paper is free to read and download for a limited time, so get your copy asap: https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S1077722922001146?token=8EB8A342BD5E91AC2238E8187C0739AC2FC329D078F2AE5D691CAEE5FC46726B3CFF1D846CC391FF528B6D51BF92D289&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20221014181416

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