Episode description
Adam Shaikh helps us unbox mental health and ethnicity. Adam helps draw the line between mental health and ethnicity and shows us why that is important from personal experience but also my macro data.
- Studies show Black, Asian and other ethnic minorities reported a 14% deterioration in their mental health from April 2017 to April 2020; for whites it was 6.5%
- The numbers are even more harrowing when you look deeper. A study from Mind shows that for every white person with schizophrenia, there are nearly three Asian and five Black people
- Covid-19 has exacerbated these issues. The death rate amongst people of colour in English hospitals has been 2.5 times higher than their white counterparts.
Adam says
"Stuck between a rock and a hard place you can feel culturally homeless, like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. For me, the dysphoria of being half Indian, half Bengali, wholly British yet unilingual brought me to this juncture. For most of my life I have felt Asian amongst Brits and British amongst Asians, never truly fitting anywhere. I caveat this with the progress we have made around racial discrimination. Multicultural Britain has enabled me to lead a rich, vital and fulfilling life whilst being brown which is not something I take lightly. I am proud to be British and it’s from a place of patriotism I believe we can do better"