If you or a loved one are facing an immediate crisis, simply call or text 988. It is the Crisis Lifeline. Trained counselors are available 24 hours a day and in many communities, they have local mobile crisis teams.
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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.
In her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved, about Black life in the immediate wake of emancipation, the great Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, gave us the character, Sethe. A mother and former slave, Sethe, in emancipation was still not free. She was a prisoner of her own mind where the tentacled terrors of enslavement had conspired to bind her tongue. All the brutality that had defined her young life were relegated to being “unspeakable things, unspoken.” It forced her to live a life disrupted by untruths, silenced truths and untreated pain.
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But Sethe’s story does not end there. By the end she is at last provided an opening to full healing by the very community of women who had once whispered about her, and her lover, Paul D. They gathered around her, each a wounded healer, and each a deliberate and unflinching witness to her pain. This was how Sethe began the dignified walk into wellness—when finally her humanity was acknowledged as sacred.
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There was a time when silence and denying our pain may have been life-saving. During slavery, we were often beaten for simply weeping when our children were sold away from us. But the silence that may have once saved us, today is the very thing that profoundly harms us. Our ancestors held quiet space so that they could survive. Their silence made our voices possible. We must learn to speak of our pain, our psychic pain, the inside wounds that can cripple us as surely and brutally as the worst physical beating.
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Many of us believe we can pray away our emotional pain. And prayer and faith are powerful forces that help to sustain us. But in the same way we do not seek to simply pray away diabetes—we take medications, we change our eating and other habits—is the same way we cannot heal what is hurting our minds, our spirits. Our minds, bodies and spirits are one. And when any of them is harmed, the other two are impacted. When we don’t treat a mental health condition, other physical conditions often arise. We deserve care, from the way deep down of ourselves where the marrow lives, the front-face of our skin, hair, eyes, hands.
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Black people are rivers and seas of memory, bodies of waters ancient and new, powerful, painful, tragic and triumphant, streaming with insistence, standing up generations of us—we, the people who were never meant to survive. Yet, survive we did—alongside all of those ghosts that remember for us both our strength and our suffering. Getting the support you or a loved one needs is an act of strength, wisdom, courage and love.
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Let us all be brave together.
​
If you or a loved one are in immediate need, call or text 988. It is the Crisis Lifeline. Trained counselors are available 24 hours a day and in many communities, they have local mobile crisis teams.
​
In her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved, about Black life in the immediate wake of emancipation, the great Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, gave us the character, Sethe. A mother and former slave, Sethe, in emancipation was still not free. She was a prisoner of her own mind where the tentacled terrors of enslavement had conspired to bind her tongue. All the brutality that had defined her young life were relegated to being “unspeakable things, unspoken.” It forced her to live a life disrupted by untruths, silenced truths and untreated pain.
​
But Sethe’s story does not end there. By the end she is at last provided an opening to full healing by the very community of women who had once whispered about her, and her lover, Paul D. They gathered around her, each a wounded healer, and each a deliberate and unflinching witness to her pain. This was how Sethe began the dignified walk into wellness—when finally her humanity was acknowledged as sacred.
​
There was a time when silence and denying our pain may have been life-saving. During slavery, we were often beaten for simply weeping when our children were sold away from us. But the silence that may have once saved us, today is the very thing that profoundly harms us. Our ancestors held quiet space so that they could survive. Their silence made our voices possible. We must learn to speak of our pain, our psychic pain, the inside wounds that can cripple us as surely and brutally as the worst physical beating.
​
Many of us believe we can pray away our emotional pain. And prayer and faith are powerful forces that help to sustain us. But in the same way we do not seek to simply pray away diabetes—we take medications, we change our eating and other habits—is the same way we cannot heal what is hurting our minds, our spirits. Our minds, bodies and spirits are one. And when any of them is harmed, the other two are impacted. When we don’t treat a mental health condition, other physical conditions often arise. We deserve care, from the way deep down of ourselves where the marrow lives, the front-face of our skin, hair, eyes, hands.
​
Black people are rivers and seas of memory, bodies of waters ancient and new, powerful, painful, tragic and triumphant, streaming with insistence, standing up generations of us—we, the people who were never meant to survive. Yet, survive we did—alongside all of those ghosts that remember for us both our strength and our suffering. Getting the support you or a loved one needs is an act of strength, wisdom, courage and love.
​
Let us all be brave together.
​
If you or a loved one are in immediate need, call or text 988. It is the Crisis Lifeline. Trained counselors are available 24 hours a day and in many communities, they have local mobile crisis teams.
asha bandele is a New York Times best-selling author and veteran journalist. She has worked with National CARES since its inception.