Race and the Modern World

’I ain’t black, I’m brown’: Race and Representation in a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) of Brief Art Therapy (AT) for people with a daignosis of Schizophrenia.

There is an extensive critique of the psychotherapies as spaces in which race and ethnicity might be understood or imagined, whether through limited access to psychological therapies for black and ethnic minority service users or from psychological distress being understood in terms of individual problems excluding the influence of collective, social factors such as racism.

This paper describes a RCT on the effects of a brief AT group on mental health service users with a diagnosis of schizophrenia in a South London NHS trust. Evidence from this RCT shows that AT produced a statistically significant positive effect on negative symptoms and suggests how the facts of race and ethnicity influenced research outcomes:

1. The research recruitment process improved access to AT services for clients from black and ethnic minorities compared to routine clinical practice.

2. Imagery produced by a white client referred to both the holocaust and to a local history of fascist and anti fascist action, engaging the desire of the white therapist to articulate the psychological aspects of racist dynamics in a small AT group with race as a collective, historical and social phenomenon.

3. Therapist assumptions about black as a political category were challenged by a client who produced images articulating his identity of being ‘brown British’.

This RCT suggested that when AT allowed a space in which race and ethnicity were articulated and contested at an individual and collective level, a positive outcome for service users resulted.