No abstract

This study was done to determine the impact of patient racial attribution on black practitioners' clinical judgments. Fifty-five professionals indicated their clinical reactions to a bogus case description of a sexually maladjusted male patient identified as black or white and also completed a traditional social beliefs scale. Relatively untraditional clinicians evaluated the black-designated patient more favorably than the white-designated patient. The less traditional practitioners also evaluated the black-designated patient more favorably than did the traditional clinicians. Effects of patient race were found for both clinical impressions and treatment decisions and were not attenuated in the more highly experienced subsample. Implications and limitations of the findings are discussed.

Two groups of psychotherapists, 41 white and37 black, averaging 8.2years' experience, completed a 41-item questionnaire regarding psychotherapy with same-and opposite-race clients. White therapists do not experience racial issues in psychotherapy with the same salience that black therapists do, yet they report higher levels of subjective distress in cross-racial treatment. This distress is focused on "negative attitudes" of clients, therapists' feelings of not being able to help or confront opposite race clients, or being oversolicitous or too distant with opposite-race clients. Both therapist groups reported equivalent abilities to empathize with opposite-race clients, but black and white therapists differed on a number of questions of racial attitudes and stereotyping. Based on responses to these parallel questionnaires of racial attitudes and same-and cross-race psychotherapy, we think that black and white psychotherapists differ in their experiences of and attitudes toward cross-racial contact and psychotherapy.

No abstract

Two cases from an adolescent dialysis group are presented to illustrate the limitations of the generally used models of patient compliance and noncompliance with medical treatment. Understanding the noncompliance of these two young men required awareness of their psychological development and of the interpersonal matrix in which they lived. Their noncompliance was the result of a failure to master a transition from dependence to autonomy which probably could not have been predicted in advance, but which might have detected as it developed and might have been avoided through appropriate interventions with the patients and their families.