Chapter Analysis: The Beauty In Breaking By Michele Harper

The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper is a memoir about Dr. Michele Harper. In this book, she discussed the ways that systemic racism finds its way into the healthcare system. In Chapter 5, Dr. Harper tells a story of a young Black man who refused to be examined after police brought him to the hospital. Had Dr. Harper not stood up for the young man, his right to refuse treatment would have been violated. This story is an example of how Black people's rights can be violated in healthcare. Dr. Harper also discussed her mental health struggles throughout the entire book. At the beginning of the book, she discussed the generational trauma in her family and how what she went through as a child led her to want to be a doctor in the first place.

This article discusses the rates of major depressive disorder in young Black adults ages 18 to 25 increased by more than 3% between 2015 and 2018. Even with this statistic, Black people are less likely to seek treatment. The reason Black people are less likely to seek treatment ranges from lack of resources to historical mistrust in healthcare. In the case of Black men, traditional masculinity roles and ideas make it difficult for men to share their emotions and be vulnerable. The article uses the National Library of Medicine to explain how Black masculinity intensifies emotional and psychological challenges such as anxiety, PTSD, and depression preventing men from seeking help to address these

This article gives multiple examples of unethical experiments performed on Black people one being the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. For 40 years, the Black men in the study were led to believe that they were being treated for “bad blood,” but in reality, they were not given proper treatment for syphilis. The result of withholding treatment from these men led to treatable deaths and their wives and children getting infected. Another unethical experiment mentioned in Medical Experiments on African-Americans in America was the work done by James Marion Sims, who is considered The Father of American gynecology. He performed multiple procedures on black slave women without anesthesia which was available at this time. Sims even documented that he operated on one woman 30 times without anesthesia. After he perfected his procedure, he later performed the procedure on White women with anesthesia. While this article gives an excellent history of why Black Americans do not trust healthcare in America, it does not answer the question “How can Black people improve healthcare for