Rupi Legha MD

02/25/2026

I finished child psychiatry fellowship in 2018 believing I had received an elite education.

No one taught me about the fenfluramine study.

In the 1990s, 34 Black and Brown boys were injected with a drug already pulled from the market — to study their “violence risk.” White children were excluded by design.

This was the same era when full-page ads demanded the death penalty for the Exonerated Five (1989).

No sanctions. No reckoning.

What psychiatry omits matters as much as what it teaches.

This history is within living memory.

Silence protects repetition.

Full piece in Psychology Today.
The full piece is now live in Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/protective-care/202602/we-need-to-talk-about-the-fenfluramine-study/amp

02/24/2026

In the 1990s, child psychiatry researchers injected Black and Brown boys — ages 6 to 10 — with a now-banned drug to study their “violence risk.” White children were explicitly excluded. No sanctions. Distinguished careers followed.

I never heard a word about this in training. That silence is the point.

02/20/2026

Liam is home. But thousands of children are still detained — in ICE facilities and in other systems that separate families in the name of “safety.”

We know what forced separation does to attachment.
We know what confinement does to a developing brain.
We know what chronic fear does to a child’s nervous system.

Sometimes the harm is the cage.

Sometimes the harm is just living in fear that the cage could come.

Last year, 11-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza died by su***de after classmates threatened to call immigration authorities on her parents.

The threat of separation can be deadly.

Healing cannot transpire in a cage.

Link in comments below.

02/19/2026

My litmus test with every kid I work with: “Do you feel like you’re being treated like a good kid or a bad kid?”
They will tell you immediately.

Here’s what most people miss about ODD — we’re operating at the tip of the iceberg. The symptoms, the checklist, the diagnosis. But what lies beneath is so much richer and more profound. And that’s where the real work lives.

What if we started from the assumption that problem behavior is just a child’s best way of coping with an actual problem?

What is the problem? That’s the question worth asking.

02/16/2026

Family separation is systemic and devastating. Mental health providers must stop legitimizing child detention as care.

*Healing cannot transpire in a cage.*

New in .

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/protective-care/202602/family-separation-is-systemic-and-devastating

02/15/2026

Love during Black History Month looks like: showing up for the next generation, supporting Black-owned businesses, believing in myself so I can show up for others, celebrating my mom who taught me to resist anti-Black racism, doing scholarship that protects, organizing for abolition, and resting with my weenies so the work can be sustained. Love is personal joy AND collective liberation—this month and always 💗

02/15/2026

Love during Black History Month looks like: showing up for the next generation, supporting Black-owned businesses, believing in myself so I can show up for others, celebrating my mom who taught me to resist anti-Black racism, doing scholarship that protects, organizing for abolition, and resting with my weenies so the work can be sustained. Love is personal joy AND collective liberation—this month and always 💗.

02/15/2026

02/11/2026

An English crossover of the Spanish post I shared earlier.

Same mirror. Same message.

When a child is caged for existing,
joy becomes resistance.

02/11/2026

Benito Martínez - Conejo Malo, Bad Bunny - performing on the biggest stage in America just days after 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was detained by ICE. The names. The timing. The rabbit on the stage, and the rabbit in the cage.

I watched as a child psychiatrist who spends her days trying to protect kids from systems designed to break them. I watched as someone who had to learn to believe in myself when no one else did. And I understood the connection.

The Grammy handed to a child - redistribution of recognition. Children as complete human beings deserving of honor.

“I never stopped believing in myself, you should believe in yourself too.” The antidote to every single system that attacks and pathologizes our existence.

The geography lesson - “America is not just the United States” - delivered to the world. Our América is Haiti, is Puerto Rico, is everywhere our people survive and thrive.

Yo Perreo Sola as an anthem of autonomy. Your own body. Your own space.

Fashion as freedom, as rejection of respectability politics, as the refusal to shrink.

“They don’t even have to learn Spanish. They can learn to dance.” Liberation without translation, without permission, without explanation.

And then El Apagón. The performers electrocuted. The power cut and reclaimed. The blackout as both prophecy and warning.

Benito embodied exactly what the state tries to extinguish in our Black and Brown children: Joy. Defiance. The refusal to shrink. Claiming space unapologetically.

While ICE tried to break a 5-year-old for the crime of existing, Benito reminded the world that our América is everywhere Black and Brown children can dance and dream and refuse to be contained.

Two Conejos: El Conejo Malo and Liam Conejo Ramos. One celebrated. One they tried to disappear. Both refusing to be caught.

Liam is home now. But 3,800 children have been detained by ICE since Trump took office. This is devastation for their lives and development. There is no movement to decolonize mental health without freeing them all.

Free them all. So they can dance.

02/05/2026

Psychiatry pathologized enslaved people who fled captivity.

It pathologized Black men who demanded civil rights.
It had nothing to say about the enslavers who tore families apart. Nothing to say about the mobs who tormented children.

Today, it pathologizes youth resistance in foster care, group homes, and detention—but stays silent about the systems causing the harm.

This is how “mental health” becomes a tool of social control. This is how we turn survival strategies into symptoms—and use diagnosis to justify restraint, sedation, and criminalization.

New in .