Dr. Brandi Jackson, is a psychiatrist at Heartland Alliance Health’s Englewood Health Center. She works with participants to address their mental health concerns – things like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or even the effects of trauma. As a medical doctor, she also focuses on their medications and referrals for therapy. More importantly, Dr. Jackson is given a chance to serve a community that very rarely has access to such critical services.
Dr. Jackson sees the links between structural inequities that have caused the Englewood neighborhood to be a healthcare desert, and the overarching impacts of racist policies that cause trauma in the first place. Through compassion, representation, and communication, she hopes to begin chipping away at these long term injustices.
In your work, where do you see racial inequities or barriers?
Being black in America means that you’re up against an entire system that does not build you up. There are so many components of our system that are set up in a way that, if you’re born black, you are less likely to have even the basic rights that others have. Even becoming a doctor, I can feel these barriers. My medical school wasn’t the least diverse school, but there were only a handful of people in my class that were black. In my residency in psychiatry, out of 40 residents I was the only black resident. There is a sense that, by becoming doctors, we are in a space that wasn’t built for us. That can be isolating.
And I feel strongly that our patients here are up against a lot of structural barriers. I have a number of patients that have been involved in the criminal justice system. Some of the people I serve have been wrongfully imprisoned for decades. We have seen people who are survivors of police brutality, or who grew up in homes where there was a lot of struggle. Because I’m a psychiatrist, and because I deal in identity and meaning, I see how people are hurt by big picture policies. Things like red lining, or stop and frisk, or over policing of marijuana use – I see how these policies actually change the way people think about themselves, how they internalize racism.
So, when a person of color comes in to see the doctor, they are firstly expecting to see someone who does not look like them. They have experienced being talked down to by providers. They’ve experienced having their intelligence questioned, and been given diagnoses that have not been determined by evidence. I think people are carrying a lot of baggage, and a lot of it is unspoken. That results in things like not speaking up about your pain because you won’t be believed. All of it comes down to the interactions in the exam room – and it is challenging work to finally be the one doctor to ask “How are you doing?”
How does your work address these barriers?
I think what medicine needs more than ever is more providers who are willing to do the hard work of being fully present with people. Checking their own biases – not just taking a bias training, but actually addressing they ways in which we propagate a racist system. I think lot about what it means to be racist. Often times it is framed as “if you are good, you have good intentions, you cannot be racist”
The question isn’t if you are racist, it’s how you are racist. It’s in the air that we breathe. We live in a system that is deeply flawed, deeply stacked against some people. We have to move past who is racist, and be actively antiracist. Otherwise, we are part of propagating racism.
What I’m most proud of in our work is how my colleagues try to address exactly that. They work to make an environment where patients are respected. When we first opened our Englewood Health Center, people had a lot of questions about our clinic – and I feel we’ve gained the trust of this community. That’s hard won. There are so many places in this city where people from Englewood do not feel that they are respected. We want our patients to feel welcome, and it’s a credit to those that work here that they do.
Who do you look up to as a foundation for your work?
I am the descendent of slaves in America. There was a powerful picture that went viral recently, the 15 whitecoats – 15 African American medical students who took a picture in front of the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana. I think about how a few hundred years ago, I could not do what I’m doing now. I think about the resilience of my descendants, and it makes it hard to make excuses and not to push to make things better.
What makes you hopeful for your work in this space? Do you see potential for true racial equity in this sphere?
I feel like the pendulum of history swings toward equality and justice. It’s not a straight line, clearly, but we are moving. Given the tumultuous political landscape, I see young people demanding politicians and policymakers tear down structural forms of racism. I also love to mentor young people who are interested in medicine, and their ideas and dreams of finding ways to tear down those barriers to health equity make me so excited.
My source of hope is based in my colleagues. We don’t just work on making the patient in front of us better. We’re always working on making a better healthcare system, and how to make a better Heartland Alliance for the patients we haven’t even met yet. It’s not easy, but we keep striving. That’s what we hold ourselves accountable for, and that’s what I’m proud of here.
