Mental Health and Mental Illness in the Black Community
posted by Brianna Hooper | May 3, 2024 | In OpinionIssues of mental illness and mental health aren’t easy for anyone. Speaking from experience, it is honestly a lot easier to cover it up and forget about the problem. The issue is that you can’t just erase it from your memory nor forget about things such as mental health and mental illness.
Although today’s society is becoming more open to speaking about these topics. I think it is important to understand the impact of mental health and mental illness in communities that haven’t been too open on these subjects, such as the Black community in the past.
To say that there isn’t a stigma about mental illness in the Black community would be a lie. Speaking from personal experience growing up, I never understood why when the topic of mental health or mental illness was brought up my family members would either steer the conversation to another topic or shut it down all together with statements like: “oh well you don’t need to be thinking that type of stuff,” or “you don’t have that.” I never got why they said those types of things and why it was just brushed off. To be honest I still don’t really understand why it was a major issue.
I think the possible reason as to why there’s a certain stigma about mental illness is the fact that its seen as being a bad thing. Or that if we talk about these certain topics then others would think less of you or deem you now in a negative light, when in reality, that isn’t the case.
The subject of mental health and mental illness is an extremely complicated and sensitive discussion to have as a whole. And while it may seem easy to ignore these problems and put them on the metaphorical backburner, we need to have these discussions. We need to steer away from the stigma against speaking up so that we, as not only a community but as individuals, can grow for the better
Photo courtesy of Kevin Simmons
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