Several members of our team at National CARES were in a communications meeting when the subject of mental health and emotional wellness came up. They’re foundational to the work we do across all of our programs—with young people and adult mentors and leaders alike. But before we even begin ideating on ways to address the topics, one of our colleagues begins to speak from the heart.

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She tells us of her brother, handsome and caring, he’s a shy and gentle spirit of a man who possesses an artist’s sensibility. She is his caretaker and has been for years, for decades if we’re counting. This beloved, tender man has lived with mental illness since he was a child, not yet in the double-digits. On that day, his sister’s devotion to him—and her willingness to speak openly of him—transformed our workspace into a brave space, and another voice, one often quiet and still, offered the story of her son.

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He is majestic, she told us, an artist—and that he recently had a breakdown, something not uncommon among young men his age. He is doing better now, seeing a doctor, and adhering to his recommended course of treatment, including the medication. But we could all hear that difficult potpourri of hope and worry, specific to parents, in her voice. It could no more be ignored than the sound of toxic shame that punctured each word voiced by the person who spoke after her. She offered an unmasked though truncated testimony about her own arc of depression, where it took her, where it left her. 

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It was in this way that our conversation flowed for nearly an hour. We needed time to honor our truths about mental illness. We needed to say that they ran the distance between mild depression to severe psychoses, and everything in between. We needed to affirm the humanity of people who live with a mental-health disorder. We needed to  say that like all of us, their birthrights included knowing peace, dignity—and love. 

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We needed to say out loud that mental-health disorders were nearly all treatable; that early death was not inevitable and with the right medical supports, most could live a life without ongoing disruptions; and that while mental health illnesses spare no community, it’s also true that the greater the number of social slings and arrows launched against any particular group, the harder it is to manage our psychic wellness and belief in ourselves. The more socially isolated and marginalized a people are, the less access they have to treatment, accurate information and investment in their wellness.

Nearly 70 million adults and children in the U.S. live with a mental-health challenge. That’s 20 percent of the entire population! For Black people, the data tells us that roughly 37 percent of us will experience a mental-health disruption during the course of our lives. But that figure is based on diagnosed illnesses, excluding the many of us who don’t consider the pain we feel inside as a health matter that can be treated. Not feeling great has long been normalized–or flat out denied in Black communities.

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We began the National CARES Mentoring Movement more than 20 years ago as a vehicle designed to galvanize adults in our communities–including ourselves—to fully embrace principles of wellness in mind, body and spirit. We believed then, as we do now, that when the adults in a community are healthy, so too will the children be because as we have for centuries, even those of us among who had the least, still centered the well-being of our children. 

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Many social realities and policies, including the over-incarceration of Black moms and dads, have disrupted what was once our natural way of being and doing when it came to our babies. In a world that leans toward judging and blaming parents and children, we wanted to simply provide our communities with the tools all of us needed to feel and be whole. We understood that our children would not know wellness if we, the adults who surrounded them, did not. It’s been no simple undertaking. 

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For centuries, and even today, pain specific to our communities has been trivialized and diminished—when it was acknowledged at all. In an interview for the global mental health website, Deconstructingstigma, Dr. Christine Crawford discussed a time when, during medical school, she was doing her psychiatric rotation. It was the area of medicine that interested her the most. 

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The response by primarily Black people–who she, a Black doctor, most longed to serve—was negative, running the gamut from asking her why she didn’t want to be a real doctor, to why she wanted “to work with ‘those people’.”  Dr. Crawford came to see that the very people who could have benefitted from her work, often distanced themselves from it because of stigma—one that added to others foisted upon us about race, intelligence, poverty and social status.

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But the harms of mental illness affect us and our indigenous brothers and sisters more. Generations of loss, brutality, and inequity, coupled with lack of regard for our humanity and access to culturally grounded, quality healthcare deepen its impact. Along with these social factors, the silence about our mental health borne of our internalized shame, is quite literally killing us and our children, whose deaths by depression-driven suicide, continue to rise.