Mental health is vital to wellness but is often undertreated or navigated silently. This is especially true in Black communities.
We can look at recent examples of Black folks in the spotlight who seemed to silently experience mental health complications before their deaths by suicide, such as dancer and DJ Stephen “Twitch” Boss, TV personality and former Miss USA Cheslie Kryst, and actor Lee Thompson Young.
These are just a few high profile examples that let us know that while poverty is a risk factor for mental distress, complications are present throughout the Black community, regardless of socioeconomic status.
In 2020, suicide was the third leading cause of death for young Black adults between ages 18 and 24 years. Even with increasing media-facing conversations around the importance of mental health, statistics like these prompt questions about the role of mental health within the Black community.
Are people in Black communities more prone to mental health conditions?
Black people are more likely to report feelings connected to diagnoses, such as depression, but are significantly less likely to receive treatment.
This prompts the question of whether Black communities are more prone to mental health conditions. To address this, it’s important to acknowledge the role of racism as a form of trauma.
Racism as trauma
The demographics of those affected by traumas include people:
- who have engaged with law enforcement and police brutality
- who have experienced sexual assault
- who have experienced houselessness
- with intersectional identities, such as Black trans women or folks with disabilities
Black people make up a disproportionate amount of these groups.
These skewed numbers can be explained through racism’s role in the construction and maintenance of our systems and institutions. It’s crucial to also acknowledge that, on its own, racism is a health crisis.
Trauma affects individuals in their day-to-day lives and can be passed through generations. It can affect how you connect with others, raise your family, and make decisions. This trauma can also lead to the internalization of negative ideals and harmful narratives, such as the Strong Black Woman schema.
As a result, many believe that Black people shouldn’t need to rely on anyone or anything else to keep moving. From others outside the community, there’s often an expectation of resilience and applause for being strong.
This may not sound inherently negative, but these platitudes are often used instead of providing tangible support when a person needs it. This gives way to continued hypervigilance or hyper-independence, both of which can result from individual or historical trauma.
Everyone needs support sometimes, and it’s OK to ask for and accept help. And because of the role that race-based discrimination and its connected trauma have on Black communities, there’s ample room for both systems and individuals to take the initiative on that support.
How does the health system affect these communities?
In addition to the environmental conditions that are often a barrier to accessibility of treatment, the health system’s history and continued discriminatory practices negatively affect Black communities and their mental health.
Social determinants of health
Social determinants of health are factors within a person’s environment that can affect their health, well-being, and daily life. According to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, these factors are grouped into five categories:
- economic stability
- education access and quality
- healthcare access and equality
- neighborhood and built environment
- social and community context
Accessibility
Each of these has the ability to directly affect our mental well-being and overall health, partly due to whether health-related services are accessible.
When it comes to accessibility, there’s a lot to consider, including factors such as location, finances, and shared identity.
Location and time
Mental health services can be hard to access due to cost, insurance complications, or location.
The growing number of digital apps and healthcare professionals offering telehealth services during and following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic helped some people. But the issue of reliable internet service is another factor, particularly for those living in rural areas.
Identity and experience
It’s essential to find a therapist or mental health professional who makes you feel comfortable, shares similar identities or experiences, and has experience with your concerns — particularly when starting a type of therapy that may be less familiar to you.
Research from 2022 showed that health outcomes were better when trust was built. Connecting with health professionals with similar lived experiences can often increase this trust. This is especially true for Black folks who live at additional intersections, such as neurodivergence or LGBTQIA+.
Finances
Checking those boxes can reduce your pool of available resources even further when you’re also tasked with finding someone in network with your insurance.
Other times, not having insurance is the issue. According to research from 2016, Black people have the lowest rates of active health insurance.
For those with high copays or who are interested in therapists and counselors that don’t take insurance, paying for sessions out of pocket each month (or potentially a few times per month) isn’t feasible.
If you have to choose between therapy and groceries or therapy and gas for the month, prioritizing your mental health through therapy may not make the cut.
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Get free cardWhat’s the relationship between Black communities and mental health?
While vast and full of varied complexities, Black communities have historically shared barriers to accessing mental health services. There are different reasons for this, but a major one is the continued stigma surrounding the topic.
Stigma
The stigma surrounding mental health and Black communities is connected to a lack of open conversation about people’s experiences. This can ultimately contribute to how mental health is seen in Black communities.
Even though many individuals navigate mental health conditions or neurodivergence, this continued lack of transparency or willingness to accept help can be attributed to many longstanding aspects of our collective cultures, including religion and hypervigilance.
But shifting away from narratives that demonize mental health conditions can be difficult when a lack of conversation is coupled with negative experiences with the healthcare system.
Religion
While mental health conditions and prioritizing your mental health are more recent topics reaching central conversations in pop culture and media, this isn’t always reflected within Black communities.
Because of the Christian church’s role in Black culture, coupled with the disproportionate rates of untreated mental health conditions, folks within the faith work to remove these barriers and remove stigma by having open and honest conversations. But for some, acknowledging a mental heal condition can feel like an absence of trust in God or giving in to negativity or “sin.”
Distrust in medical communities
Medical distrust plays a significant role in how Black communities navigate mental health treatment.
Those who lived through Jim Crow or segregation can speak candidly about how Black people were treated by doctors and the differences in resources given to hospitals for Black communities.
The Tuskegee Experiment and Henrietta Lacks serve as two well-known examples of how Black people have long navigated being used, mistreated, and mutilated by the medical community.
While the continued fear and distrust are warranted, the mistreatment of Black people within the medical field has continued.
In fact, in addition to being the root of the stigma that Black communities have internalized, this lack of adequate treatment, cultural humility, and inclusion reinforces these narratives on a regular basis.
Today, Black people are more likely to be misdiagnosed and have their pain ignored, in addition to being less likely to receive optimal care or be included in medical research.
Because of this continuing racial bias within the medical system and the low rates of Black folks in psychiatry, serious institutional changes and ongoing support are needed before that trust can be rebuilt.
Summary
With the skewed rates of emotional distress, often caused or worsened by race-based trauma, support in mental wellness is important but not always accessible.
Not everyone is in a position to engage in traditional talk therapy or explore other mental health care options. But there are ways you can lean into your wellness regularly.
This could include:
- listening to music and dancing
- having open conversations about what you’re experiencing with trusted loved ones
- making art or journaling
- holding yourself accountable for setting time aside for self-care and not always prioritizing everyone else
- cooking and eating food that brings you comfort
While the trauma Black communities navigate is deep-rooted and ongoing, there are ways for us to find joy and tend to generational wounds individually. One of the ways this can happen is by addressing the vitality of mental well-being and remembering that we’re worthy of feeling our best.
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