School Mental Health Professionals' Knowledge of Stereotypes and Implicit Bias Toward Black and Latinx Youths.

Clinician bias is a contributor to health care inequities, but research on racial-ethnic bias among mental health professionals, especially toward minoritized youths, is limited. This column describes two studies involving mental health clinicians in schools, where most youths access mental health services. Study 1 used a mixed-methods approach to identify stereotypes about Black and Latinx youths salient to clinicians (e.g., academic failure; anger and aggression). In study 2, the authors developed four Implicit Association Tests to assess clinicians' implicit prejudice and stereotyping of Black and Latinx youths and found pro-White and anti-Black/Latinx bias at levels similar to those of other health care providers and the general population.

A Brief Online Implicit Bias Intervention for School Mental Health Clinicians.

Clinician bias has been identified as a potential contributor to persistent healthcare disparities across many medical specialties and service settings. Few studies have examined strategies to reduce clinician bias, especially in mental healthcare, despite decades of research evidencing service and outcome disparities in adult and pediatric populations. This manuscript describes an intervention development study and a pilot feasibility trial of the Virtual Implicit Bias Reduction and Neutralization Training (VIBRANT) for mental health clinicians in schools-where most youth in the U.S. access mental healthcare. Clinicians (N = 12) in the feasibility study-a non-randomized open trial-rated VIBRANT as highly usable, appropriate, acceptable, and feasible for their school-based practice. Preliminarily, clinicians appeared to demonstrate improvements in implicit bias knowledge, use of bias-management strategies, and implicit biases (as measured by the Implicit Association Test [IAT]) post-training. Moreover, putative mediators (e.g., clinicians' VIBRANT strategies use, IAT D scores) and outcome variables (e.g., clinician-rated quality of rapport) generally demonstrated correlations in the expected directions. These pilot results suggest that brief and highly scalable online interventions such as VIBRANT are feasible and promising for addressing implicit bias among healthcare providers (e.g., mental health clinicians) and can have potential downstream impacts on minoritized youth's care experience.