Mental health misdiagnosis twice more likely for socially disadvantaged groups

The shooting of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson ignited a global discussion about implicit racial bias. You might think that clinical therapists -- people trained to understand the mind -- would be immune from this bias. But a new study finds that the social identities of patients and therapists affect the accuracy of the diagnosis: Therapists were twice as likely to misdiagnose mental illness when patients were from a disadvantaged, compared to an advantaged, group.

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