Opportunities for psychologists to advance health equity: Using liberation psychology to identify key lessons from 17 years of praxis.

Health and health care inequities persist because the efforts to eliminate them have ignored structural racism, typically using a power neutral approach to diagnose and solve the problem. Critical theory can address many of the conceptual weaknesses of current approaches, help identify how racism operates in health care, and open the door for more effective individual employee and organizational actions to advance health equity. We apply Martín-Baró's (1996) liberation psychology to lessons we learned through implementing a transdisciplinary national health and health care equity program.

Policy Opportunities To Improve Prevention, Diagnosis, And Treatment Of Perinatal Mental Health Conditions.

One in five pregnant or postpartum people has a diagnosed mood or anxiety disorder, which are the most common mental health illnesses that occur during the perinatal period. Untreated perinatal mental health conditions, encompassing pregnancy and the first five years of a child's life, carry a societal burden of $14 billion per year in the US. This overview article describes the prevalence of perinatal mental health conditions; the implications of those conditions; and associated barriers to screening, treatment, and bias associated with mental health conditions.