Race and Hospital Diagnoses of Schizophrenia and Mood Disorders (Report‪)‬

Disparities in mental health services are currently the focus of consumers, providers, policymakers, and researchers (Dougherty, 2004; Snowden, 2003). This attention stems in part from the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (2003), which formulated the goal of eliminating disparities in mental health services as one of six interrelated goals necessary to transform America's mental health system. Studies have consistently shown that African Americans are disproportionately represented in state psychiatric hospitals and have raised questions about bias in involuntary hospitalization derived from ethnic and racial stereotypes (Lawson, Hepler, Holladay, & Cuffel, 1994; Milazzo-Sayre et al., 2001; Snowden & Cheung, 1990). Although the percentage of people receiving treatment in state psychiatric hospitals has drastically declined under deinstitutionalization, in comparison with all other mental health organizations, state psychiatric hospitals still provide the highest percentage of inpatient psychiatric services in the United States. In the year 2000, state psychiatric hospitals provided care for 30 percent of the inpatient population, an estimated 54,808 people (Manderscheid et al., 2004). About one-third of the admissions to state psychiatric hospitals involve individuals with schizophrenia (Milazzo-Sayre et al., 2004).