Black Psychiatrists
22 Black psychiatrists listed nationwide, 3 offering telehealth. Every listing self-identified; 9 license-checked.
A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who treats mental illness. They diagnose, prescribe and adjust medicine, order tests, and look for physical causes of symptoms that look psychiatric. Some also do therapy. Many work alongside a therapist rather than instead of one.
See a psychiatrist when symptoms are severe, when they have not shifted with therapy alone, when medicine is already in the picture and is not working or is causing side effects you cannot live with, or when there have been episodes of mania, psychosis, or thoughts of suicide. If you are in danger right now, call or text 988.
Bring the record. Every psychiatric medicine you have taken, the dose, how long you took it, and exactly what happened when you stopped. Every other medicine and supplement too, since some of them change sleep and mood. A rough timeline of episodes, in the order they happened. And if anyone has ever given you a diagnosis you did not agree with, bring that as well, and say so out loud in the first appointment.
The evidence for concordant care
Two percent of practicing psychiatrists in the United States are Black, against about 14.4 percent of the population [2].
The consequence that has been studied hardest is diagnosis itself. A review of the empirical literature in the World Journal of Psychiatry found that Black patients receive psychotic disorder diagnoses at a rate on average three to four times higher than white patients [1]. The same review reports that Black and Puerto Rican patients are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia even when measures of psychopathology do not indicate that the diagnosis is justified, and that most authors attribute the pattern to racial diagnostic bias, meaning judgments made on the basis of race [1]. It also reports that the clinician's own race did not appear to change the trend [1]. That last point matters, because it means this is not something a patient can fully solve by choosing carefully.
What you can do is make the record harder to misread. Mood symptoms are the ones most often lost. If low mood, sleep loss or a stretch of unusual energy came before the unusual beliefs or the voices, say so in that order, and ask for it to be written in the notes in that order. Ask directly what else was considered and why it was ruled out.
Access is the other half of the problem. In 2024, Black adults were 36 percent less likely than US adults overall to have received mental health treatment in the past year, while the share reporting any mental illness was 20.9 percent against 23.4 percent [3]. Under-treatment and over-diagnosis are not opposites. They travel together, and both get worse when the first psychiatrist someone meets is also the last one they are willing to see.
Sources, checked 21 Aug 2026
- World Journal of Psychiatry (Schwartz and Blankenship, 2014). Racial disparities in psychotic disorder diagnosis: A review of empirical literature. Fetched 21 Aug 2026.
- Journal of Patient Experience (Ajluni and Michalopoulou, 2025). Addressing the Underrepresentation of African American Mental Health Professionals: A Call to Action. Fetched 21 Aug 2026.
- HHS Office of Minority Health. Mental Health and Black/African Americans. Fetched 21 Aug 2026.
Conditions psychiatrists treat
Anxiety
Nearly one in five US adults had an anxiety disorder in the past year, treatment works, and Black adults are far less likely to receive any of it.
Depression
Depression is treatable, and Black adults are markedly less likely to receive treatment for it than US adults overall, even though the two report mental illness at close to the same rate.