July is BIPOC Mental Health Month, a month that recognizes the mental health experiences and struggles unique to Black, Indigenous, and people of color in North America. Not many people know of this month, but whenever we hear about it, we typically read about the numbers on how many of us are experiencing mental illness and distress, the disparities within these numbers, how many of us are getting professional help, and how many are not. These reports aren’t inherently bad, but what doesn’t get discussed as often are the causes as to why mental illness and distress exist in the first place.
A widely known reason why it is more challenging for BIPOC to access mental health services is racial poverty. Another reason why racialized communities do not pursue mental health services is our common suspicions toward therapy. For some of us, there is a historical stigma ingrained when it comes to the topic of mental illness.
Although things are changing within mental health communities, only a few mental health professionals have competent awareness of cultural and racial identity, let alone incorporate this awareness in clinical treatment. This inaccessibility includes but is not limited to language barriers between therapist and client. Undocumented people from immigrant and diasporic communities also need to be vigilant around services with high degrees of surveillance, and therapists are expected to take this seriously as mandated reporters.
What do we do with what we know? Therapy can be very helpful, but we have to remember that therapy is not the standard nor the only place to find healing and safety. Therapy has benefited numerous lives to develop a strong self-awareness in light of their background and trauma, and it is also not the only setting where this type of transformation can occur.
In de-pedestalizing therapy, how can we pursue resources and foster spaces of healing that reside outside the institution and are instead led by BIPOC communities? What if the medicine we are looking for has been within us and our communities all along?
Read more at YesMagazine.org.