Psychiatrist 'race bias' fades

Black men are more often forcibly admitted to hospital

Psychiatrists are less prone to make clinical judgements based on race than a decade ago, a survey has revealed.

Research carried out in 1990 showed that psychiatrists were more likely to rate black male patients as potentially violent and schizophrenic than white patients.

But the authors of a new study published in the British Medical Journal concluded that doctors were now much less likely to make such assumptions based on race.

Around 500 psychiatrists - equivalent to 10% of their total number in the UK - responded to a survey asking how they would assess a new patient.

What it showed us was that in 10 years senior psychiatrists have learned something and we're better able to assess people in terms of their individual state rather than their racial grouping

Dr Shubulade Smith

Half received a photograph of a white patient, the other half a black patient.

The results showed the doctors felt white patients were more likely to be difficult to manage than black patients and to be more of a risk to others.

There was no difference in how much of a danger they considered the patients to pose to themselves.

Better assessment

One of researchers, consultant psychiatrist Shubulade Smith, told BBC News Online there was already a lot of evidence pointing to inequalities in mental health care on the basis of ethnicity.

Black people in the UK are six times more likely than whites to be diagnosed as schizophrenic and committed to hospital involuntary.

But previous research showed the incidence of the illness among people in the Caribbean was identical to that of the white population in Britain.

But Dr Smith said the responses to their questionnaire showed that psychiatrists were not the root cause of the problems.

"What it showed us was that in 10 years senior psychiatrists have learned something and we're better able to assess people in terms of their individual state rather than their racial grouping."

The findings had come as a welcome surprise but there were still some racial stereotyping in patient assessment, Dr Smith added.

"For example, the psychiatrists felt black patients were more likely to have had a social worker or some sort of learning difficulty."

Dr Smith hoped that by ruling out psychiatrists as the main cause of inequalities in patients' subsequent care it would be possible to focus on other factors including non-medical officials such as police officers.