Jorgensen observed that the women of color were less likely than white women to have had access to mental-health care before prison, and, once they were incarcerated, their struggles were more likely to be considered acts of defiance than signs of illness. Nearly all of Jorgensen’s patients had experiences of trauma: physical or sexual abuse, incest, domestic violence, rape, abandonment. Arthur Blank, one of the first psychiatrists to recognize the struggles of Vietnam veterans who returned from the war, characterized trauma as an experience that a person doesn’t have “the capacity to
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