2024 APPA Annual Meeting

Mental Health Disparities: Social-structural, Cultural, Psychological, and Biological Mechanisms
March 6-9, 2024 
Martinique on Broadway, 49 W 32nd Street, New York, New York 10001

Research on psychopathology increasingly demands an integration of data across all levels of analysis – social-structural, cultural, psychological, and biological – on the mechanisms of disparities in the onset and perpetuation of mental disorders that vary across social groups, including by socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, sex/gender, and sexual orientation.  Disparities indicates preventable and unjust differences in mental health that adversely affect oppressed and socially disadvantaged populations.  Social structure describes the hierarchical patterning of society that distributes vulnerability and coping resources differentially across individuals and social groups, such as access to education or employment and the impact of discriminatory organizational practices.  Culture refers to the collective processes of meaning-making and social practice which individuals recreate in their own lives and that contribute to health and disease.  Psychology attends to the processes of the human mind that underlie cognition, behavior, volition, and other mental and behavioral phenomena.  Biology encompasses the embodied mechanisms that provide the material substrate of all human activity, including the mechanisms through which societal, cultural, and psychological determinants exert their effects.  The 2024 APPA Annual Meeting will review the contribution of each of these determinants to mental health disparities and help advance their integration into a coherent paradigm at the cutting-edge of current thought, with direct impact on the lives of affected individuals and communities.

Roberto Lewis-Fernández, MD
Columbia/NYS Psychiatric Institute
New York, NY