By Kiara Doyal, The Seattle Medium
While May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a month designated to raise public awareness about mental health issues, reduce stigma, and promote mental wellness, it is important to acknowledge that mental health disparities exist within the Black community.
According to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Black people may experience a higher prevalence of mental health issues compared to other races due to a combination of factors, including historical trauma, systemic racism, and disparities in access to quality mental health care. These issues can contribute to chronic stress, anxiety, and depression, and can also lead to higher rates of conditions like PTSD.
“We experienced more mental health stressors in terms of anyone else due to systemic racism,” says Ashley McGirt-Adair, CEO and founder of the Therapy Fund Foundation. “Just even looking at the history of American chattel slavery in this country, after slavery ended, no one sat down with the former enslaved folks and said here is some group therapy after they just watched their brothers and sisters being lynched and sold off. Fast forward, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, welfare laws, all of these themes, and there has never been a collective healing [for Black people in this country].”
In 2020, McGirt-Adair founded the Therapy Fund Foundation, a non-profit organization that works to eliminate barriers to healing with a special focus on Black communities who have been historically excluded from sound mental health services, as a direct response to the mental health needs of the Black community related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate around police violence associated with the murder of George Floyd.
“During the pandemic, we were overwhelmed with grief and loss and exacerbated racial stressors,” said McGirt-Adair. “I have always wanted to find a way to make mental health services accessible, and I wanted to ensure that Black therapists and everyone who practices from an anti-racist lens had the support financially, so that is really where the idea came about.”
According to the National Alliance on Mental Health, for Black men ages 15-24, suicide is the third leading cause of death, and one factor that can cause mental health challenges in Black men stems from the societal expectations of Black masculinity.
Huston Adair, a board member at the Therapy Fund Foundation, grew up in Michigan and was surrounded by many elements of what he refers to as toxic masculinity, and traditional Black male stereotypes.
“Don’t cry, be strong, be tough, suck it up, be a man. That’s the evolution of the average existence [of a Black man],” says Adair. “So, I grew up very detached from my own emotions.”
“I would be asked if I was okay, and I would say yeah, I’m alright, but in so many instances, I wasn’t. And eventually it got to a point where I was breaking down, depressed, non-functional, and didn’t realize it,” added Adair. “Somebody then suggested therapy, so I gave therapy a try and oh my God, so many revelations of my own resistance.”
Huston said that many people don’t realize therapy can be valuable even when nothing seems wrong, as it is a powerful tool for gaining a deeper sense of self-understanding.
“[Therapy] helps you have relationships with yourself, whether anything is wrong in your life or not,” said Adair. “You gain the depth of understanding, so that is why I feel like it is great. We all share one commonality, no matter which ethnicity or culture we are categorized into, we all are servants of the human condition. We all breathe the same, and so therefore we all need an understanding itself, not just what one side of the history books or the propaganda tells us about ourselves.”
As a Black man and father, Adair believes that discovering therapy and becoming an advocate for mental health has deeply influenced him, helping him become a more empathetic and understanding parent to his children.
“I am a father, and by healing my past, it has allowed me to have more of an understanding of life as it applies to being a kid,” he said. “I wasn’t saying suck it up or be a man, and I am just much more emotionally empathetic to my sons because of the depth of understanding that I have for myself.”
For McGirt-Adair, mental health awareness can be the difference between life and death.
“Awareness is extremely important,” says McGirt-Adair. “Stress is the number one killer. My grandmother died from a stroke, and the leading cause of a stroke is stress. I would definitely say that the lack of mental health support that my grandmother didn’t have led to her death. Along with systemic racism and all the things that she was dealing with, raising grandchildren in the 90s.”
“Unfortunately, she drank a lot. And I often wonder, would she still be here today if she had good coping mechanisms and access to a therapist? So, I would say mental health is literally life and death,” she added.
Through her life and work at the Therapy Fund Foundation, McGirt-Adair strives to shed light on the difference between mental illness and mental health. Mental health refers to a person’s emotional, psychological, and social well-being, encompassing their ability to cope with life’s stresses and realize their potential. On the other hand, mental illness describes specific, diagnosable mental health conditions that can significantly impact a person’s thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and overall functioning.
According to McGirt-Adair, mental health is something that everyone has to deal with one way or another. But mental illness impacts 1 in every 5 people, which is something that she hopes will soon change in the Black community.
“I think that right now there are a lot of conversations around mental health, but mental illness is still very much stigmatized. I want people to really understand the differences behind that and the things that we can do to destigmatize and provide care and resources for our community, especially Black people,” said McGirt-Adair. “But also, I would like for us to understand the harms that were done to us as people, and find ways to get past that, heal, and develop good coping skills for things that may still be here affecting us, like racism.”
“You don’t have to be crazy to go to therapy for your mental health. You can never become the man, woman, or non-binary person you desire to be until you heal the boy, girl, or non-binary child that you once were,” Huston concluded.
