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It is well known that exposure to racism and discrimination are linked to various adverse mental health outcomes. The effects of systemic racism on Black Americans have been persistent and profound, and the increase in media reports and images of police brutality and violence inflicted upon members of the Black community have only added insult to injury. The impact can be chronic and traumatic events related to racism have been unrelenting for Black people.

As mental health challenges continue to rise, some Black Americans are still not receiving the mental health care and treatment they may need. This is especially true for Black men, who are not only affected by the general barriers to medical treatment that many in the Black community face, but who also have internalized certain behaviors that fit within the social constructs of Black masculinity — ultimately impacting their help-seeking behaviors. Despite known or suspected mental health issues, Black men are for numerous reasons often reluctant to seek treatment.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health reports that Black adults are more likely than white adults to experience persistent symptoms of emotional distress, such as sadness, hopelessness, and feeling that they have to dedicate extra effort to everything they do.

Adding to these factors for Black men specifically are traditional masculinity roles and ideas across racial and ethnic backgrounds that have caused men to struggle with being vulnerable and sharing their emotions — making them even more reluctant to seek help. A growing body of research and commentary looks specifically at how Black masculinity norms and presumptions affect mental health among Black men.

Read more at Forbes.com.

Last December, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announced that we are in the midst of a youth mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 44% of high school students feel persistently sad and hopeless, and emergency room visits for suicide attempts increased 31% in 2020 compared to 2019.

As a society, we’re doing a terrible job of helping. Part of the reason is stigma. Courtney Saunders, a therapist in Massachusetts, says she sees a lot of kids come in whose parents don’t understand the importance of mental health. “A lot of kids feel unheard and unseen, their experiences don’t seem as important as what the adults are dealing with,” she says. Part of the reason is structural — and it is to our detriment because, after all, the kids are our future.

The youth mental health crisis didn’t come from nowhere — it was already simmering in the background prior to the pandemic, Vivek Murthy pointed out during the American Psychological Association’s annual conference this year. To begin with, about half of mental disorders in America go untreated, according to the National Alliance on Mental Health. On average, if a child is diagnosed with a mental disorder, it can take up to 11 years before they receive treatment — if they receive treatment at all.

Read more at FastCompany.com.

A new film about a bank robbery in Metro Atlanta is raising new questions about mental healthcare for black veterans. The movie titled “Breaking” tells the story of Iraq war veteran Brian Easley’s 2017 hostage standoff at a Wells Fargo bank on Windy Hill Road in Cobb County. When Easley walked into the bank in the summer of 2017, he was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Easley called the WSB-TV newsroom and said he had a bomb. Easley promised not to harm hostages but voiced his frustration with Veteran’s Affairs after he said he didn’t get his disability check. Easley was shot and killed by police during the incident.

Channel 2 Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell spoke with Dr. Bakari Vickerson, a faculty psychiatrist for Morehouse School of Medicine, about the struggle black veterans face when it comes to mental illness and the resources that are needed for veterans in general.

“In telling his story, you’re not just telling his story, but you’re telling the story of many veterans, black male veterans who have had somewhat of a similar experience. Maybe it didn’t get to the extreme in which they felt they had to go to a bank in order to hear their challenges, or to make sure their challenges were heard. They all go through similar challenges, and a lot of times, that can leave a person feeling alone. Feeling as if they have done so much for this country but yet have not received enough, or anything in return. I know some of the issues that they’ve had to face just growing up black here in this country — let alone to couple that with either serving in the military or actually serving in combat,” said Dr. Vickerson.

Dr. Vickerson has experience working with black men in the military as well as veterans.

“Mental health should be a stronger component of military services because the risk is so great. The risk is so great that we should already have something in place to screen and also treat veterans as soon as possible,” said Dr. Vickerson.

Read more at WSBTV.com.

The Sport for Refugees Coalition hosted a virtual panel discussion in June to explore the role of sport in mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS). Experts from different sectors and disciplines shared their knowledge and expertise on this cross-cutting topic, discussing how to increase recognition of the role of sport and physical activity in supporting people’s mental health and well-being in situations of forced displacement and how to encourage collective action of major stakeholders.

In their interventions, panellists highlighted the valuable role of sport in achieving positive outcomes for MHPSS, especially for forcibly displaced persons and how this connection between physical activity, mental health, and psychosocial well-being is increasingly being acknowledged on a global scale.

Implementing long-term physical activity patterns are fundamental for target groups. In fact, the regularity that sport provides helps children feel safe and stable. This can be done through constant support from families and trainers,” says Samer Jouba, Training Officer and Project Coordinator at Right to Play Palestine.

“These interventions should be implemented at an early stage [of emergency situations] to create a sense of normalcy and build children’s resilience,” says Nathalie Metheuver, Programme developer and Master Trainer at Team Up Global. This is critical because sport activities can allow parents and coaches to establish important connections with children, which can in turn help them to release the tension accumulated after having experienced traumatic events.

Read more at SportandDev.org.

It’s been well established that LGBTQ+ youth are at increased risk for suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts compared with their straight and cisgender counterparts. But according to the Trevor Project, this research is among the first to consider how the intersectionality of identifying with more than one ethnic or racial identity affects suicide risk.

“To our knowledge, this new report is the first of its kind to exclusively explore the mental health and well-being of multiracial youth who are LGBTQ, highlighting their unique mental health experiences, risk factors, and protective factors,” says Myeshia Price, PhD, the director of research science at the Trevor Project, who is a co-author of the report.

Across nearly all the questions about feelings of anxiety and depression, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts, the young people who identified as multiracial were at higher risk than those who identified as monoracial. In most cases, those who identified as exclusively a youth of color had a higher risk than those who identified as white and another race or ethnicity.

The data also showed that multiracial youth were slightly more likely to report having had feelings of anxiety in the two weeks before taking the survey than monoracial youth (75 versus 72 percent). And among the multiracial youth, those who identified as exclusively a youth of color were slightly more likely to have such feelings than their peers who identified as white and another race or ethnicity.

“This work is also significant in that it explores the experiences of multiracial LGBTQ youth of color compared to multiracial LGBTQ youth, who may identify to some degree as white, which expands the conversations around white privilege and how it is experienced by these youth,” says Nicholas E. Grant, PhD.

Read more at EverydayHealth.com.

In scrolling black ink, LeToy “Toy” Lunderman illustrates intergenerational trauma like this: three big circles represent three generations, the first circle nearly empty but for a sliver of solid—representing all that was taken from survivors of boarding school—and the subsequent circles gradually filling with solid until the last circle is whole again.

She’s the middle circle, the conduit between hardship and healing, among the generation of children born in the mid ‘70s who grew up in the years immediately after the federal government abandoned its Indian Boarding School policy.

But it would take her a while to recognize how deeply she’s been impacted by a school system she didn’t directly experience, though she was educated in the same buildings where many in the generations before her experienced abuse: Saint Francis Indian School, formerly Saint Francis Mission, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

‘Historical trauma’ is a term that came of age alongside Lunderman. First coined in the 1980s by Native American social worker and mental health expert, Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart (Hunkpapa/Oglala Lakota), the term conceptualized historical trauma as the “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding, over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma.”

Read more at NativeNewsOnline.net.