Why mental illnesses "don't exist" in a black household.
I first began to feel 'different' when I was 15.
Up until then I was pretty much a happy-go-lucky girl. School was going good, my friends were supportive and coursework wasn't a thing.
A few months after my birthday however, things started to change. I noticed myself becoming recluse. I didn't meet with friends, I didn't want to be with family and I had lost my passion for everything. All I wanted to do was sleep. I'd take days off school "sick", simply because I couldn't get out of bed. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. My parents had dubbed me the "moody teenager" and attributed my mood changes to hormones.
I too agreed.
As I turned 16 and GCSE's approached, my mood remained the same. Various friendships of mine had come to an end causing me to recede further and further into the solitude state. I began to feel the added stress of exams and revision and as a result my constant anxious state started to effect my sleep. I'd come from school, revise be wide awake until 4/5am nap and then be up again for school at 6am.
I reached out to my mother again about my issues with sleep and worrying only to be told that " I wasn't sleeping because I wasn't trying hard enough".
By the age of 18, I had left 2 jobs because of the constant anxiety attacks I was having at work.
The simple fear of not working fast enough or not doing something correctly would set me off. I'd call my cousin on my break to try and help me calm down (my cousins are pretty much sisters to me), only to be told to "stop overreacting".
I knew that something wasn't right and that I needed to talk to someone about what I was experiencing. The constant disregard of my feelings by my family made me hesitant to talk, but in a state of despair, I reached out to friends and wrote them a long paragraph summarising my feelings, reasons for my odd behaviour – essentially a cry for help.
Two of my friends opened up to me and discussed a similar relationship in her household with the word "mental health".
Both of them who are black, stated that their parents do not believe in illness of the mind and refer to them as difficult and problem children.
I decided to look into the topic further and found various articles and statements from young people on social media discussing the idea of mental illnesses not belonging/existing in a black household.
But that still doesn't explain why.
Why is it that we are so reluctant to accept the idea of an illness affecting our ability to do things simply because we cannot see it. Why are we as a race choosing to disregard the symptoms/illnesses we see in our own rather than encouraging them to seek help? And why do we still believe that suffering from a mental illness would bring shame on a family?
These are questions we can only ask ourselves as we seek to provide a better society for the generations to come.
