Mical Raz

Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps Professor in Public Policy and Health University of Rochester

Rochester NY

Author of "What's Wrong with the Poor? Psychiatry, Race and the War on Poverty."

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Spotlight

Sep 14, 2021

1 min

Anti-mask ordinances amount to disability discrimination

University of Rochester health policy expert Mical Raz says anti-mask ordinances amount to disability discrimination for individuals with compromised immune systems—that includes people who have cancer and autoimmune disease, as well as those who have received organ transplants. As Dr. Raz explained in a recent Washington Post essay, immunocompromised individuals—even those who are vaccinated—may now find themselves inadequately protected in workplaces where mask requirements are legally banned and there are no vaccine requirements. Dr. Raz also co-authored a piece in the JAMA Health Forum discussing the implications of some states banning attempts to mandate masking. As she points out, vaccines have been less effective in individuals with different categories of immunosuppression. Dr. Raz concludes that allowing mask requirements is an important form of disability accommodation.

Areas of Expertise

Foster Care and Adoptions

Child Welfare

Psychiatry

Education Policy

Race Culture and Ethnicity

Poverty & Public Policy

Education

Child Abuse Policy

Public Health

Child Protective Services

Adoption Services

Media

Social

Biography

Mical Raz, MD, PhD, MSH is Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps professor in public policy and health, and associate professor of history and medicine at the University of Rochester.

She completed her medical training at Tel Aviv University, from where she also received a PhD in history of medicine. Before moving to the US for a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, she worked at the Tel Aviv Medical Center and volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital in 2015, followed by a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a practicing hospitalist at the University of Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital, and is board certified in internal medicine.

A historian of American psychiatry, Raz is interested in the intersection of psychiatry, poverty and politics. Her current research project is a history of child abuse policy in the United States, from the 1970s and onwards.

She is the author of The Lobotomy Letters: The Making of American Psychosurgery (University of Rochester 2013), which was awarded the Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Career Development Award. Her second book, What's Wrong with the Poor? Race, Psychiatry and the War on Poverty (UNC 2013), was a 2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

Education

Tel Aviv University

PhD

History

Selected Media Appearances

Now seen as barbaric, lobotomies won him a Nobel Prize in 1949

Washington Post print

2023-10-09

Some did appear to have a positive response. Mical Raz, a historian at the University of Rochester who wrote “The Lobotomy Letters,” said lobotomies helped quiet down psychiatric hospitals and sometimes enabled patients to go home. Raz pointed to letters of gratitude sent to lobotomists, and even though she would never recommend the procedure now, she said “there were a lot of individuals and families that experienced relief” from lobotomies.

Netflix’s Hit Take Care of Maya Scratches the Surface of a Huge Problem

Slate print

2023-07-06

• BY MICAL RAZ - The Netflix documentary Take Care of Maya, currently in the service’s Top 10, follows the plight of a family facing an accusation of child abuse. At age 10, Maya, who lives in Florida, was admitted to the local children’s hospital. Suffering from an uncommon and poorly understood chronic illness, complex regional pain syndrome, Maya had been sick for a number of years. Her parents, desperate to alleviate her symptoms, took her to see unconventional experts, who prescribed treatments that departed quite starkly from mainstream standards of care. When Maya’s medical team encountered her history of experimental treatment, including a trip to Mexico for a dangerous and unregulated “ketamine coma” therapy, they were understandably concerned. This resulted in the hospital making a referral to child protective services for “medical child abuse,” previously known as Munchausen by proxy.

Maya and her family were now ensnared within what I, and other advocates, call a system of family policing. Maya was hospitalized and kept away from her family, loved ones, and community for nearly three months. Due to a perverse ideal of “child protection,” Maya was alone, vulnerable, and felt unheard by the medical staff.

Stop tearing America’s families apart

NY Daily News print

2022-12-12

According to Dr. Mical Raz, ASFA’s fast and punitive timelines are “not based on data and do not reflect what we know about the realities that struggling families face.” These timelines do not take into account that affordable housing, child care, public benefits, mental health care, domestic violence support or substance use programs often take months — or even years — to secure. For instance, families with housing vouchers in New York City face rampant discrimination, greatly extending the time it takes to obtain a place to live.