Audience member William Lawson, M.D., brought up the work of Surgeon General David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D., in his 1999 report “Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General.” One of the points made in this report was that virtually all psychiatric studies done in the United States included primarily white males, so almost all the available psychiatric drugs had less than 1% African American participation, said Dr. Lawson, chair of psychiatry, Howard University, Washington.
“And the consequences have been awful. For example, once the second-generation antipsychotic medications came on the market it became clear that the risk of obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome was much more of a problem for African Americans and Hispanics than for whites. We don't want to improve the mental health of our patients at the expense of giving them complications that can be lethal,” Dr. Lawson said.