Tag: Women In Mental Health Care

Women have been integral in the history of mental health care, with earlier pioneers like Mary Whiton Calkins — the first female president of the American Psychological Association and an innovator in learning techniques — paving the way for women doing great things in the field today. 

Since March is Women’s History Month, we here at bonmente wish to highlight some of the pioneering women currently working in the mental health care field. 

Reiko Homma True

Born in Niigata, Japan, Dr. Reiko Homma True, took the long way to becoming a psychiatrist. 

She graduated from Tokyo University’s English and International Business Program and moved with her husband and child to San Francisco after facing numerous job rejections on the basis of her gender. 

In California, she got into social work, where she saw that the American mental health care system did not adequately account for cultural differences in treatment. She lobbied local governments and helped establish the Asian American Community Mental Health Program in Oakland, which was the first minority-focused mental health center in California. 

After getting a master’s degree in social work from UC‒Berkeley, she began a support group called Himawari-kai (“sunflower”) that assisted Japanese women who recently arrived in the United States. 

Driven by her social-work efforts to gain a better understanding of mental health, she earned a doctorate from Alliant International University’s California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP). She helped found the American Psychological Association and helped establish the Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs in the APA. 

In the mental health care field, her accomplishments are both within academic study, where she researches how to bridge cultural differences in mental health care, and in the public, developing community programs in San Francisco and across the Southwest.

The spirit of community service has not left her, as she has helped assemble mental health response units for disasters in California and Japan.

Kay Redfield Jamison

A leading authority on bipolar disorder (the mental illness once known as “manic depression”), Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the foremost researchers in mental health. She is the Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders and Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. 

She stands out in the field being an expert on a mental health condition that she happens to also have had an intense struggle with.

Shortly after earning a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UCLA and beginning a professorship in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry, the mood swings that she had been suffering for years became so difficult to deal with that she sought psychiatric help from a trusted colleague, who gave her a diagnosis of manic depression.

She discussed her struggles with being bipolar in her best-selling 1995 memoir An Unquiet Mind, which remains a well-regarded text on the condition. 

Marsha Linehan 

In the 1970s, Dr. Marsha Linehan developed dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a key treatment technique that applies to a wide range of mental health conditions. 

DBT is based on mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). The treatment is largely for people who experience intense emotions. 

The word “dialectical” had largely been used by philosophers when discussing contradictions. The term fits well for this particular treatment, which deals with trying to help patients reconcile the beliefs and behaviors associated with their mental health issue with alternative beliefs and behaviors that can improve their condition. 

Validation, which is not the same as agreement, is the key to DBT. Instead of trying to pitch unhelpful and unhealthy conduct as “wrong” to the patient, the mental health care provider validates the conduct by acknowledging that such conduct could make sense for someone with the patient’s condition. 

Dr. Linehan drew on more than just her educational background to develop DBT. 

Her personal experience in seeking help for mental health issues – which left her feeling worse off – informed her quest. Though she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, she later perceived this as a misdiagnosis and felt that she really had borderline personality disorder.

For treatment, she was given electroconvulsive therapy that gave her cognitive issues, memory loss being one. Being locked alone in an isolation room for suicidal behavior and self-harm did not help either; while in there, she self-harmed and experienced frequent suicidal thoughts.

These negative experiences drove her to develop a new treatment method. She studied behavioral psychology at Loyola University in Chicago, where she also earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in experimental and social personality psychology.

Beverly Daniel Tatum

President emerita of Spelman College, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum is a clinical psychologist who has made significant contributions to the study of race relations, with a particular focus on the psychology of racism. 

She earned her B.A. in psychology from Wesleyan University, and M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. Additionally, she has an M.A. in Religious Studies from Hartford Seminary. 

Her research demonstrates that racism in American educational institutions has an impact on racial-identity formation, and also covers the phenomenon of self-segregation. Additionally, she has studied assimilation of Black families into predominantly white neighborhoods.

She is also a best-selling author, best known for her book “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations About Race. 

In 2014, she received the APA Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology; she is also a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Need mental health services? We can help.

The team at bonmente treats a number of mental health disorders through evidence-based mental health treatments, several of which were developed thanks to the work of these amazing women in mental health care. We can verify whether your health insurance covers our treatment and get you started on a path to better mental health today.