The Public Health Penalty of Attending to the Proximal
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11029679 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sandro Galea (0000-0002-7534-0945, Sandro Galea is with the School of Public Health, Boston University, Boston, MA. Roger Vaughan is with The Rockefeller University, New York, NY.), Roger Vaughan (0000-0002-1336-4079, Sandro Galea is with the School of Public Health, Boston University, Boston, MA. Roger Vaughan is with The Rockefeller University, New York, NY.) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 111 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 193-194 |
| Publication date | 2021-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Journal of Public Health (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0090-0036 • E-ISSN: 1541-0048 |
| Publisher | American Public Health Association (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2105/ajph.2020.306075 |
| PMID | 33439709 |
| OpenAlex | W3119469301 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
Clearly, a distal approach to this challenge would be to dismantle a system of incarceration that also doubles as a system of housing people with mental illness and to replace that with a compassionate approach that considers how we tackle the influences that might drive mental illness and how we create systems that can provide support and care for persons with mental illness rather than consign them to a carceral system that, at best, does not tend to their core mental health problems and, at worst, exacerbates them 5 The challenge for public health is that we have a large, and seemingly intractable, system of incarceration as a clear and present reality, and thinking only about undoing such a system exposes us to reasonable charges of unhelpful idealism Hedden et al study such systems with the aim of finding whether race/ethnicity is associated with access to jail- and community-based mental health treatment Given the simple observation that those with more power, privilege, and access are more likely to obtain benefit from any intervention,6 even in, for example, a jail system, it stands to reason that an intervention that targets only the more proximal mechanisms of action will result in exposing underlying inequities, potentially widening health gaps
Criminology · Intervention (counseling) · Mental health · Mental illness · Political science · Privilege (computing) · Psychiatry · Psychotherapist · Public health · Undoing · Health disparities and outcomes · Health Policy Implementation Science · Law · Medicine · Mental Health Treatment and Access · Nursing · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |