The physician burnout discourse emphasises organisational challenges and personal well-being as primary points of intervention. However, these foci have minimally impacted this worsening public health crisis by failing to address the primary sources of harm: oppression. Organised medicine’s whiteness, developed and sustained since the nineteenth century, has moulded training and clinical practice, favouring those who embody its oppressive ideals while punishing those who do not. Here, we reframe physician burnout as the trauma resulting from the forced assimilation into whiteness and the white supremacy culture embedded in medical training’s hidden curriculum. We argue that ‘ungaslighting’ the physician burnout discourse requires exposing the history giving rise to medicine’s whiteness and related white supremacy culture, rejecting discourses obscuring their harm, and using bold and radical frameworks to reimagine and transform medical training and practice into a reflective, healing process.
This paper introduces a historically informed antiracist approach to psychological practice aimed at disrupting American psychology’s legacy of racism by first saying “No More” to the whiteness engulfing it. Its end goal is to detour psychological practices away from enduring legacies of oppression, reimagine psychological practice as an antiracist endeavor, and extricate the deep-seated structural whiteness rotting the profession at its core. No more building resiliency takes aim at the White discourses directing people suffering under the weight of White supremacy to bear it instead of compelling mental health professions to dismantle the systems of oppression causing the harm. Seven historical themes reveal how organized psychology has shaped and been shaped by racism and whiteness since its inception. By identifying the language and strategies used to cover up and sustain the racist harm by design, the themes provide starting points for antiracist psychological practices that interrogate and dismantle both forms of oppression. They issue the imperative for a critical, transparent, and transgressive psychology of the future, one that requires not a revision of existing practices, rather a complete redo. The closing section imagines where we go from here by offering immediate action steps for bringing this antiracist future closer within reach.
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