Black Psychiatrists in Iowa: A Brief Update

I was just googling the search terms “Black Psychiatrists in Iowa” and “African American Psychiatrists in Iowa” recently after finding a broken link in my 2019 blog post “Black Psychiatrists Iowa.”

I always think it’s funny that the results of my web search invariably show mainly a couple of mistakes. One is that I typically find my colleague, Dr. Donald Black, MD, a white male, misidentified as Black. The other mistake is that the search engine makes is confusing psychologists with psychiatrists, as though there were no difference. This happens every time, even nowadays in what many would call the era of wokeness.

The broken link was to what I thought was The 2018 Greater Iowa African American Resource Guide. I discovered the link leads to Iowa State University Diversity, Equity and Inclusion web page along with the “Page not found” notice. I could not find a 2018 issue of the guide on the web.

I found the 2019 guide, which showed that there were only two Black psychiatrists listed, me and Dr. Rodney J. Dean who founded the Dean and Associates psychiatry clinic in Sioux City, Iowa. I guess now there might be only one Black psychiatrist in Iowa.

I could not find later editions of the guide following 2019. I don’t know they were compiled or published by Kimberly Baxter, Director of the Iowa Accountability Program (IAP). According to the director, the guide was widely thought of as useful (see page ii of the guide). I wonder if the Covid-19 pandemic played some role in halting production of the guide.

However, I found a newsletter published (I didn’t see a date) on the Iowa Judicial Branch web page of Iowa Court dot gov web site, indicating the IAP was still active in domestic violence prevention programs. The IAP received a $900,000 continuation grant from the US Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women to continue court services for domestic violence victims. Thankfully, Kimberly Baxter is still active as Executive Director of Special Projects.

I don’t know if there will ever be another edition of The Greater Iowa African American Resource Guide.  I think it did a better job of tracking how many Black psychiatrists there are in Iowa than Dr. Google ever did.