The Center for Community Solutions Features Blog Post about PEP
In Feb. this year, The Center for Community Solutions‘ Eboney Thornton published a blog post entitled “PEP: Interrupting Disparities in the Behavioral Health Pipeline.” The piece featured thoughts from PEP’s CEO, Habeebah R. Grimes and from Marilyn Mauck, who was PEP’s chief instruction and achievement officer at the time. This week, Community Solutions is featuring the article again in an email campaign called, “10 Things You Need to Read This Week.”
The piece opens by recalling an incident in 2020 in which an 8-year old child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder was the youngest person to be handcuffed by Ohio’s Cleveland Division of Police. Thornton says she sought to understand the effects of racism on mental and behavioral health by interviewing Grimes and Mauck. She asked both to share their thoughts and experiences on three topics:
- disparities and barriers in diagnosis,
- advocacy and education, and
- what would they hope to see happen within the behavioral health system.
Grimes began, explaining, “Racism has prevented us from creating a more robust, structured behavioral health system for all of Ohio.” It’s not surprising then that there are barriers to access. It’s also not a surprise that biases and racism play into the over identification of BIPOC children in special education. Mauck said she “would want every child and family to have equal access and quality to behavioral health programs.”
To read the full blog post about PEP click here.