February 28th, 2025

Dr. Poussaint treated the country’s racism and mental health of Black Americans

In his career spanning a half century, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint treated many patients, from adults and children in private practice to public housing tenants in the country’s first community health center. But to improve the mental health of African Americans, the prominent psychiatrist believed his country needed ongoing treatment too — for the mental illness afflicting all who live in the United States, racism.

His expansive view of the country’s mental health needs led Poussaint to join the Civil Rights Movement, consult with network television shows on accurate portrayals of Black people and push the American Psychiatric Association to declare delusional racism a mental health disorder, an effort that did not succeed.

Poussaint emerged a public figure from his television appearances and articles in Ebony magazine, a rare stature for a Black professional whose community still attaches, though less so, a stigma to mental illness.

A son of Haitian immigrants who was born in Harlem, Poussaint died Feb. 24 at his home in the Brookline section of Chestnut Hill due to medical complications from a short illness. He was 90 and had retired as a professor at Harvard Medical School in 2019.

“He understood racism beyond the impact it has on Black people. He understood racism as a mental health and public health problem,” said Rita Nethersole of Boston, a niece. “Racism has impacted all of us and made all of us less.”

Amy Alexander, who coauthored a book on Black suicide with “Dr. P.,” as she called him, said he was “sometimes kind of radical,” asserting that “Blacks often suffer from ‘post-traumatic slavery syndrome’” and that racism causes some white people to “lose touch with reality.”

“Look at where we are right now,” Alexander said in phone interview from Sacramento, California, referring to MAGA supporters of Donald Trump. “I think he was right about that.”

His wife, Dr. Tina Young Poussaint, noted her husband developed relationships with numerous historic figures, including civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson; entertainers Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby; and pioneering psychologist Kenneth Clark. When he was president, Bill Clinton consulted Alvin Poussaint as did Joe Biden as vice president, she said.

Nethersole said the Poussaint family, in which Alvin was born the seventh of eight children, struggled through the Depression living in East Harlem, then a polyglot community. When he was 8 years old, he caught rheumatic fever, leading his big sister — Nethersole’s mother Delores — to carry him to the hospital. For months, he was hospitalized or convalescing and turned to reading while he was recovering.

Poussaint went on to graduate from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Columbia University and Cornell University Medical College. He underwent postgraduate training at UCLA, where he earned a master’s degree in psychopharmacology.

In 1965, Bob Moses, the legendary civil rights leader, invited Poussaint to come to Mississippi, where he briefly worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He remained in the state for two years, providing medical care to civil rights workers and helping desegregate hospitals. “People thought he had lost his mind. He was in LA. But he felt he had to,” Nethersole said of the early detour in his career.

After leaving Mississippi, Poussaint arrived in Boston to join Tufts Medical School as director of a psychiatry at a clinic that served residents of the Columbia Point public housing development in Dorchester. Known now as Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center, it was the first community health center and became the model for others around the country.

In 1969, he joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School. That year he also participated in a brash protest to compel the American Psychiatric Association to address “the neglect and abuse of Black psychiatrists and the Black community” and create committees to allow Black members greater input in the organization, said Dr. Stephen McLeod-Bryant, president of Black Psychiatrists of America.

“He and his colleagues stormed the board of trustees meeting in 1969 in Miami,” McLeod-Bryant said. He said Poussaint is considered a founder of the professional organization and called him “an example for all of us to follow.”

At Harvard Medical School, Poussaint served as dean of students from 1975 to 1978. He actively and successfully expanded the diversity of the school’s student body while leading its affirmative action program.

A 2010 article in the Banner credited him with bringing in more than 1,000 underrepresented students of color and broadening enrollment to include Native Americans, Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans. Before his arrival, the school had enrolled a total of 27 African American students since 1915.

McLeod-Bryant, who is in private practice in Miami, said Poussaint had an even wider impact by mentoring many Black psychiatrists and other mental health professionals.

Dr. Altha Stewart, so far the only Black member elected president of the American Psychiatric Association, wrote in remembrance that Poussaint inspired her to “get serious” about her professional role as a Black psychiatrist while she was attending a summer program at Harvard, McLeod-Bryant said.

“What he’s best known for is his impact on how Black Americans are portrayed in mass media,” added McLeod-Bryant, who lived in Jamaica Plain for four years while doing his residency at Tufts Medical Center.

Poussaint was a script consultant to “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World,” network series in the 1980s and 1990s that portrayed Black Americans more as they are and avoided stereotypes. He also consulted with the “Sesame Street” public television series to influence children before racist attitudes formed, McLeod-Bryant noted.

In 1984, Poussaint served as Massachusetts chairman of Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” campaign for president. Joyce Ferriabough Bolling, who did communications work for that campaign, said Poussaint brought credibility and a wide network of contacts.

“He was always the calm in the storm for the day,” Ferriabough Bolling said. “Some would say that’s what psychiatrists do. He was a cut above.”

Poussaint also wrote books to raise awareness and understanding of the mental health problems that afflict Black Americans and the country. He was author of Why Blacks Kill Blacks in 1972; coauthor, with James Comer, of Raising Black Children in 1992; and coauthor, with Amy Alexander, of Lay My Burden Down in 2000.

Alexander, a journalist, was motivated to write the book in part because a brother had taken his own life. She said her editor at Beacon Press in Boston suggested she ask Poussaint to help with the book, and he agreed to become coauthor despite his busy schedule.

Part of his mission, Alexander said, was to increase funding for mental health services and “culturally competent” care for Black people. He said he was able to see some improvement in both during his lifetime.

Poussaint is survived by his wife of 32 years, Young Poussaint, chief radiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and a radiology professor at Harvard Medical School; son Alan; daughter Alison, a student at Howard Medical School; sister Delores Nethersole; and numerous nieces and nephews.

A celebration of his life is to be announced. Davis Funeral Home in Roxbury is handling arrangements.

Alvin F. Poussaint