But before we can begin to shape the outputs, our colleague begins to speak. 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 this day, his sister’s devotion to him—and her willingness to speak openly of him—transformed an otherwise more clinical workspace to, if not a safe space, surely a brave one.
Then there’s another voice, one often quiet and still. The woman who speaks describes her majestic son, an artist—and his recent breakdown and diagnosis. He is doing better now, she tells us. He is seeing a doctor, 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 offers a truncated testimony about her own arc of depression, where it took her, where it left her.
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 the knowing of peace, dignity—and love.
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.
More than 60 million adults and children in the U.S. live with a mental health challenge. That’s 20 percent of the entire population—whether we’re talking about Black people, other people of color or white people. But the harms that arise from mental illness are greater in our communities because of the lack of access to treatment—and our internalized shame about mental health. They are quite literally killing us and our children, whose deaths by depression-driven suicide, continue to rise.
We began the National CARES Mentoring Movement more than 20 years ago as a vehicle designed to galvanize the adults in our communities, help us embrace principles of wellness in mind, body and spirit and mentor and advance our young who are growing up with the harms of poverty. We understood that our children would not know wellness if we, the adults who surrounded them, did not. It’s been no simple undertaking. For centuries, and even today, pain specific to our communities has been trivialized and diminished—when it was acknowledged at all.
In her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved, about Black life in the immediate wake of emancipation, the great Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, gave the character Sethe. A 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 and untreated pain. But Sethe’s story does not end there. 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, wounded healers, intentional and unflinching witnesses to all of that pain. This was how Sethe began the dignified walk into wellness. 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.
Too many of us say we can pray away our emotional pain. While prayer and faith are critical and powerful forces that help to sustain us, 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 are 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.
asha bandele is a New York Times best-selling author and veteran journalist. She has worked with National CARES since its inception.
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