Joy notes that “symptoms of mental health concerns can look different in Black women, and without clinicians who are culturally attuned to our community, important information can be missed.” In my own family, while there were few cases of diagnosed mental illness, there were ample “short tempers,” “weak constitutions,” and “bad nerves.” And though no one would call them as such, there were phobias too: of driving, flying, fireworks, big crowds, and enclosed spaces. This inspired her to begin Therapy for Black Girls, an online media network and therapy directory that includes more than 1,400 Black women therapists and other therapists of color around the nation.ĭr. ![]() Joy (as she prefers to be called) noticed that Black women were not using her services at the same rates as their non-Black peers. Even though I was still in the infancy of my wellness journey, I knew that I was beginning a process of deep excavation into the fibers of my life and, by extension, the lives of my parents, their parents, and their parents’ parents.Īs a school psychologist working in college counseling centers, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and decided to begin with a no-frills talk therapy approach with a provider I found on the website’s directory. My first step in seeking help was to find a therapist to whom I could relate. Suspicious of psychiatrists, who I saw as the health system’s high-end dope dealers, but still recognizing that I needed help, I did a simple internet search for “Black women therapists near me.” I found a website called Therapy for Black Girls, created by Dr. Centuries of living under the psychological stresses of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, settler colonialism, and genocide are bound to have an impact on cognitive functioning and manifest in what we now term “mental illness.” There have long been major blind spots in conventional Western approaches to treating mental illness in African American and Native American communities. When I discovered that the origins of many individual issues can be traced to familial and generational harms, it became apparent that the closer intervention and treatments are to our ancestral ways, the more effective they can be. My own mental health journey began with destigmatizing mental illness and eventually transformed into an acceptance of mental health care as an inextricable part of holistic wellness. This can be traced back to not only a deep skepticism of Western medicine, but also to pervasive cultural beliefs that admission of mental illness is a sign of weakness. The difficulty of seeking and affording culturally competent mental health treatment in the U.S.-one of few developed nations without a universal health care system-is compounded by social stigmas within Black and Indigenous communities. To me, mental “illness” was recognized only in its most extreme forms-severe bipolar or major depressive disorder, psychosis, delusions, schizophrenia-and therapy reserved for the truly “crazy.” It turns out, I wasn’t alone in this belief. During college, I only vaguely remember learning about counseling services, and certainly never considered utilizing them. Until then, I had never before considered psychiatric care. ![]() His brow furrowed in concern as he asked me if I’d ever talked to someone about this. I informed him distractedly that this “just happened” to me when I got nervous. While checking my vitals, he was alarmed by my spiking diastolic pressure as I prepared to tell him the reason for my visit. ![]() If these positive cultural markers are passed down, it follows, then, that the negative ones are as well. My own mental health journey began after my OB-GYN suggested that I seek psychiatric treatment. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the West African goddess of fertility, Yemanjá, is also the goddess of fishermen, and to this day, in Black American families, dreaming of a fish is an omen of pregnancy. We see our elders perform them in subversive ways, such as grandmothers entering a meditative state in the middle of the day by “resting their eyes,” or expressing that a child has “been here before”-a tacit recognition of their reincarnation, acknowledging the inherent sanctity of the very young and very old. The ways of our ancestors are buried deep in our consciousness, emerging unwittingly and at random.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |