Dr. Stephanie Eng remembers the night clearly.

It was 2019. She was a first-year emergency department intern during her general psychiatry residency at the University of Chicago Medical Center. A young Black woman had come in saying she had been sexually assaulted. Overwhelmed by the amount of medical history she had to gather from the patient, Dr. Eng recalls what she did next.

“I remember registering what information felt relevant to me at the time,” she said. “I looked at what she was wearing, what her hair looked like, what her face looked like, all of those superficial physical attributes. And then I remember reading her medical chart and seeing words like: Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Conduct Disorder. The downside of diagnoses like that are that they can sometimes bias [a doc

See Full Page