Clinicians' reluctance to engage in environmental interventions for children's psychiatric illnesses, which may seem to implicate parents, may stem from a desire to stand apart from mid-twentieth-century psychiatrists who blamed mothers for pediatric mental illness.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Dorothy E. Roberts, JD
The call for structural competency encourages medicine to broaden its approach to matters of race and culture so that it might better address both individual-level doctor and patient characteristics and institutional factors.