Since 2020, Psychiatric Services has taken steps to examine the effects of structural racism on the journal and institute changes to address it, including enhancing the diversity of the editorial board and column editors; appointing a 12-member antiracism task force to advise the journal; publishing peer-reviewed articles and commentaries that address racism; and more. Psychiatric Services will now “embark on the next phase of this process, which directly involves the submission and peer-review procedures,” Dixon and colleagues wrote.
As part of a six-month pilot, authors submitting research articles to the journal will be prompted to use a 16-item checklist during the submission process to assess the comprehensiveness and applicability of factors related to race/racialization, ethnicity, and culture (REC) in their mental health research articles. (The checklist that Psychiatric Services will use is a modified version of an REC checklist developed by the Cultural Committee of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, under the leadership of Roberto Lewis-Fernández, M.D., a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.)
The journal editors will seek feedback from authors and reviewers about the use of the checklist. “Our accumulated experience will be used to guide ongoing use of the checklist and possible expansion to other types of articles. Our experience may also serve as a guide for other journals interested in the use of the checklist,” Dixon and colleagues wrote.
They concluded, “Our aim as a journal is to engage in a continuous process of reevaluation and improvement to produce a corpus of high-quality published work that contributes to the ongoing process of promoting health equity and eliminating the impact of structural racism in mental health services. Implementing the REC Checklist is one more step in this process. We welcome your input and suggestions for additional ways to achieve our goal; comments may be directed to PSCentral@psych.org (subject line: REC Checklist).”
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