The undersigned CMU students agree with CaPS' sentiment that we all must take an active role in racial justice on campus. As students and as patients of CaPS, we believe it is our duty to use the student voice to detail changes CaPS can make for equality. We want to be very clear that we appreciate existing measures taken by CaPS and that our goal is not to antagonize or place blame. Our goal is simply to provide an organized student voice to help drive the path forward. The full text of our petition is copied below, and the demands are summarized at the end.

Students at CMU and throughout the US are calling on our institutions to take an active role in racial justice. This applies to all parts of CMU, including CaPS. As CaPS has noted in their public statement on racial justice, racism is a mental health issue: the trauma of racism is a cause of racial disparities in mental health, yet BIPOC therapists are under-represented professionally (e.g., less than 4% of therapists in the US are Black) and BIPOC patients often face disproportionate barriers to care.

CMU students agree with CaPS own assessment that “statements of support [...] are not enough” and that every part of CMU, CaPS included, must “be part of progress and solidarity, not inaction”. As of this writing, a student petition on racial prejudice at CMU has explicitly called on CaPS to diversify hiring, and has over 2000 signatures.

We concur with the previous petition, and our goal is to supplement it with concrete, measurable demands. We acknowledge that CaPS has been proactive on diversity and inclusion, and we especially applaud the work of therapists of color at CaPS. We are explicitly not placing blame. Our goal is to use the present moment to go further, and some of our demands are expansions or refinements of existing CaPS policies.

CaPS is particularly well-positioned to address racial justice at this time. In November 2019, CMU received a $35,000,000 grant to expand student health services over several years, including a significant expansion of CaPS. As CaPS' staff is likely to expand, we call on CaPS to ensure its staff is always at least as racially diverse as the US population.

Many patients at CaPS are seen by trainees in CaPS internship, residency, and post-doctoral programs. We call on you to strengthen diversity and inclusion measures in these programs, which will improve service both for students and beyond our campus after trainees complete their programs. CaPS should proactively seek equitable representation in the therapy profession by prioritizing recruitment of BIPOC trainees.

There is also value in culturally competent care from therapists of all races, who will serve diverse patients throughout their careers. CaPS’ predoctoral internships already have a weekly diversity seminar, we call on CaPS to ensure this content is also in post-doctoral and residency programs. Training must also be supplemented by accountability that is based on accurate information. We call for inclusion to be an explicit evaluation criterion for all staff and trainees, as it already is for interns. To ensure these evaluations are meaningful, we call on CaPS to provide anonymous and retaliation-free reporting methods for patients, staff, and trainees who have been affected by racism. For example, the Intern Grievance Procedure is not anonymous and requires the complainant to make written statements to multiple directors, which may cause some interns to leave incidents unreported. Anonymous feedback would ensure that students and trainees can not only raise major offenses, but can comfortably provide feedback on everyday cases of insensitivity.

Lastly, we must address the relationship between psychiatric care and policing, as police brutality is a central focus of Black Lives Matter. Most crisis-intervention hotlines (“suicide hotlines”) have “active rescue” practices where a caller is escorted for treatment, sometimes by a psychologist, but most often by an armed police officer. While active rescue is sometimes required by law, using armed officers for this purpose has historically led to preventable deaths. This may make students afraid to use any hotline, even those which rarely or never send armed officers.

CaPS operates a crisis hotline, and we could not find public documentation about the use or non-use of active rescue by this hotline. We ask CaPS to provide a publicly-documented active rescue policy that pledges never to use police for active rescue except if required by law. If ever required by law, the frequency of police active rescue should be documented. We ask for public information about current and future steps to address all issues raised in this letter, especially student-facing issues. This will promote trust between CaPS and the students who need you the most.

In summary, we call on CaPS to commit to:

Diverse Hiring

1 Prioritize hiring of BIPOC full-time staff, interns, residents, and post-docs to ensure parity with the US population (e.g. 13% Black). Training programs should aim to exceed parity.

2 Revise all application and hiring processes to account for both individual and systemic biases, specifically including racial bias in letters of recommendation and inequalities of opportunity. All staff who serve on hiring or admissions committees, or who perform evaluations or letter-writing, must be trained to counteract these biases.

Training and Accountability

1 Make racial cultural competence and sensitivity an explicit evaluation criteria for all trainees and staff.

2 Make cultural competence and sensitivity part of the training curriculum for all trainees.

3 Provide anonymous reporting mechanisms, with non-retaliation guarantees, for both patients and staff. Revise the Intern Grievance Procedure to include these mechanisms.

Increased Policy Transparency

1 Publicly document active rescue policy and publicly commit not to employ police for active rescue except when required by law.

2 Document measures for diversity in hiring, training, and accountability.