Ethnic Influences on Psychiatric Diagnosis

Neighbors, Harold

Abstract

The purpose of this proposal is to investigate ethnic influences on the diagnosis of black and white patients in a public psychiatric hospital. While much has been written about how the psychiatric diagnostic process operates with African American patients, a careful review of the empirical research literature reveals that many questions remain. This application proposes a secondary analysis of four interconnected datasets composed of both quantitative and qualitative information from primary and secondary sources. The first dataset is based upon a test-retest study of diagnosis with black and white depressed and schizophrenic patients. The second is a self-administered clinician questionnaire that was completed after the test-retest study. The third dataset is a review of patient charts during which information contained in medical records was abstracted for all DPI patients who were eligible for the test-retest study. The fourth dataset comes from a psychiatric admission history file. This file contains admission and discharge data on every hospitalization for each DPI patient. In this study, we benefit from available clinical data to: 1) explore the influence of patient ethnicity on psychiatric diagnostic agreement, disagreement and confusability; 2) analyze qualitative data from a self- administered clinician questionnaire that describes lines of diagnostic inquiry and verbal/nonverbal cues used in making the diagnosis; 3) supplement the test-retest study with treatment data abstracted from patient charts; 4) conduct quantitative analyses on psychiatric admission histories.