Josh McGhee

Chicago

Chicago Bureau Chief & Investigative reporter covering the intersection of criminal justice & mental health @MindSiteNews Fellow: @MaynardInst & @CarterCenter

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Articles

Black Kids Overdiagnosed With Oppositional Defiant Disorder

1 week ago | imprintnews.org | Josh McGhee

‘Bad kid’ diagnosis ‘greases the school-to-prison pipeline,’ doctor says. This story was co-published with permission from MindSite News. Black children are disproportionately diagnosed with a mental health condition known as oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), which serves to label them as “bad kids” and perpetuates systemic racism, says a California psychiatrist in a report released in January.
Q&A: Black kids overdiagnosed with ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’

2 months ago | youthtoday.org | Josh McGhee

This story was originally published by MindSite News. ‘Bad kid’ diagnosis ‘greases the school-to-prison pipeline,’ doctor says Black children are disproportionately diagnosed with a mental health condition known as oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), which serves to label them as “bad kids” and perpetuates systemic racism, says a California psychiatrist in a new report released this month.
Black kids overdiagnosed with "oppositional defiant disorder"

2 months ago | mindsitenews.org | Josh McGhee |Rob Waters

‘Bad kid’ diagnosis ‘greases the school-to-prison pipeline,’ doctor says Black children are disproportionately diagnosed with a mental health condition known as oppositional defiant disorder, which serves to label them as “bad kids” and perpetuates systemic racism, says a California psychiatrist in a new report released this month. Dr. Rupi Legha is a California-based child psychiatrist offering anti-racist solutions.
Police, Use of Force, and the ‘Bad Kid’ Label Applied to Black Kids

2 months ago | mindsitenews.org | Josh McGhee

Welcome Back MindSiters, and congratulations on making it through the first month of 2025. This month, we’ll be diving into the story, published today, that caps an exhaustive two-year investigative collaboration that I helped to lead with the students and faculty of the Medill Investigative Lab-Chicago. Together, we obtained data from dozens of cities and examined how often police departments use force when responding to people experiencing mental health crises.
Behind the Infamous Stanford Prison Experiment

Nov 21, 2024 | mindsitenews.org | Josh McGhee

Friday, November 22, 2024We’re coming to you a week early to give you extra time to brine your turkey. This month, we’re looking at a new National Geographic documentary questioning the findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment 50 years after the controversial study. We’ll also take a look at what it’s like for people with Attention Deficit Disorder in prisons – what is and isn’t done to improve life inside for them.
Series Reveals the Secrets Behind the Stanford Prison Experiment

Nov 21, 2024 | mindsitenews.org | Josh McGhee

A new documentary series on the study challenges us to reimagine what we’ve learnedThe summer before his freshmen year of college, in 1971, Clay Ramsay lived with a few buddies just a few steps from Stanford University. They’d move between anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and a nearby coffee house, where they’d gather and play chess. In those days, cafe bulletin boards often contained flyers recruiting students to take part in research studies and clinical trials.
"Punished for Being Mentally Ill": Restraint Chairs in Jail and Prison

Oct 28, 2024 | mindsitenews.org | Josh McGhee

Sorry for the delay: We’re just getting back from the District of Columbia, where I moderated a panel on filling gaps in the crisis care continuum at the Association of Healthcare Journalists’ Summit on Mental and Behavioral Health. In this month’s Diagnosis: Injustice, we’ll talk to two reporters from the Illinois Answers Project — Meredith Newman and Grace Hauck — about their ongoing investigation into the use of restraint chairs in prisons and jails across the state of Illinois.
A Movement for Treatment not Trauma Advances in Chicago

Sep 27, 2024 | mindsitenews.org | Josh McGhee

We’re back in Chicago just in time for the Fall weather after a visit to the Carter Center in Atlanta, where my time as a Rosalynn Carter mental health journalism fellow has come to an end. What an amazing experience. During my time there, I heard stories from fellow fellows like Lee Hawkins, who created the “What Happened in Alabama” podcast, which unpacked the trauma of a Black family from the South, and Sandhya Raman, who explored the mental health impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade.
988 New Tech Will Connect Callers to Local Resources Faster

Sep 24, 2024 | mindsitenews.org | Josh McGhee

Calls were previously routed based on area code, sending calls to call-takers nowhere near the caller. For two years, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline has been using the area code assigned to callers’ cell phones to route calls to crisis counseling centers, a practice that sometimes led to calls being handled by people nowhere near the caller’s actual location.
More Mentally Ill People Languish in Jail Than We Thought.

Aug 30, 2024 | mindsitenews.org | Josh McGhee

One way that people with mental illness get stuck in the criminal legal system is being jailed – for weeks, months and sometimes years – awaiting a hearing to determine whether they are mentally competent to stand trial for an alleged criminal act. Most often, those acts are misdemeanors like trespassing, vandalism, fraud or possession of a controlled substance – and they are often a result of the person’s illness.