Rameri is a founder member of the association of Black Psychologists. She was fascinated by mental health nursing after her aunt was detained in a forensic unit. Here she describes her intellectual journey and the formative years she spent working in the Castle in the 1980s. She describes how the doctors worked in internalised world of the ‘there and then’, leaving a space (the community) for the nurse to work with the patient about ‘the here and now’ and how it is affected by the ‘there and then.’ It was only gradually that she came to realise that her colleagues understood about intrapsychic trauma but shied away from the structural oppression in the lives of Black and mixed-heritage patients. They reflected on everything apart from their whiteness. Rameri gave a trenchant critique of racism in the caring professions in a book called Face to Face with Distress. Her approach to psychotherapy now is Psychodynamic and founded on an African centred psychological understanding, the underpinning philosophy of Ubuntu (humanity).
Rameri
"I think we never talked about race then, never. And there was never an acknowledgement in the same way as "oh you've got breasts". My blackness actually played a role in the fact that the patients liked me, the patients engaged with me. They never undermined. I think also it is because they thought I was closer to them in some kind of ways."