Manisha Gupta Advocates for Chronically Ill Patients
As a full-time patient advocate for disability and health equity, Manisha Gupta, PhD, is leveraging her background in social psychology to address implicit bias and discrimination in healthcare. Gupta, who serves on the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity (CHE) Community Advisory Board (CAB), draws from her experiences as a woman of color with multiple chronic illnesses to improve health outcomes for patients with chronic illnesses.
Gupta's social psychology training guides her professional trajectory, together with a profound (and personal) understanding of implicit bias, prejudice, and discrimination. Her research probes the psychological factors that drive stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination across various group memberships, such as race, gender, and nationality.
But academia was only the beginning of Gupta’s mission. She wanted to figure out why people developed negative views of others based on the groups they were part of, and how they were able to justify mistreating them.
“My ultimate goal and focus was to apply these insights to improve the design of intervention strategies focused on bias reduction for fostering more positive attitudes and behaviors across group lines,” Gupta says.
Central to Gupta's advocacy is her work combating implicit bias within healthcare settings. She highlights the profound impact of bias on clinical decision-making, citing research by CHE director, Lisa Cooper, MD, MPH on how implicit racial biases adversely affect patient care outcomes, particularly for communities of color.
“Implicit biases, often dismissed as subtle and inconsequential, can indeed have profound effects, especially in contexts where quick decisions are crucial, potentially determining life or death outcomes,” Gupta says.
Gupta leverages her personal experience as a woman of color with chronic illness to frame her work addressing the stigma surrounding chronic illness and disability, particularly among underserved populations. Gupta's unique perspective, rooted in academic research and lived experience, allows her to “recognize subtle signs of implicit bias in my interactions with providers in their exam rooms (e.g., body language, eye contact, facial expressions), as well as in their clinical notes (e.g., stigmatizing language being used in my chart to connote disbelief, skepticism, etc. about the existence and severity of symptoms.”
“Implicit biases, often dismissed as subtle and inconsequential, can indeed have profound effects, especially in contexts where quick decisions are crucial, potentially determining life or death outcomes."
- Manisha Gupta
Because of these hidden biases, women, especially those of color, disabled, or facing multiple forms of marginalization, experience longer delays in receiving accurate diagnoses and treatment compared to white, male, and able-bodied individuals. Despite the challenges of her work, Gupta feels a responsibility to use her professional and personal experiences to make an impact in this challenging field.
"My personal experiences have motivated me to share my story publicly," Gupta says. "I feel a sense of obligation to raise awareness and improve understanding of these conditions, particularly for underserved populations."
Gupta's solutions are as nuanced as the challenges she faces. She advocates for foundational institutional norms emphasizing diversity, equity, and inclusion, alongside interventions to foster collaboration between physicians and patients, including implicit bias training for healthcare professionals.
“I hold the belief that motivated individuals can evolve and improve their attitudes over time… and that most doctors ultimately want to treat all their patients with the same quality of care,” Gupta says.
"My personal experiences have motivated me to share my story publicly. I feel a sense of obligation to raise awareness and improve understanding of these conditions, particularly for underserved populations."
- Manisha Gupta
Furthermore, Gupta stresses the importance of wider implementation of “lived patient experience” in research. “It is often the case that patients with poorly researched, poorly understood… diseases have to become more of an expert in their conditions than their own doctors are – particularly if you belong to one or more groups (e.g., women, BIPOC, disabled) who have traditionally been underrepresented in research,” Gupta says.
Gupta points to the CHE CAB as an example of how research can, and should, make space for the voices of the patients and community members who experience the issues at the heart of a study.
“I am a deep believer and supporter of CAB’s model… I hope to see this model become more widely institutionalized moving forward,” she says. "Change does not come easy, but I wholeheartedly believe if I can assist even a small number of women to secure accurate diagnoses, or to help them better comprehend their conditions, this effort is more than worthwhile.”
Read more about Gupta’s lived experience and research.
Like Millions of Women, I Live With Chronic Pain — and I’ve Had to Learn to Advocate for Myself
Substandard of Care: Accommodations in Healthcare
From Scientist to Patient: When Health Care Equity Becomes a Personal Struggle