Depressed while Black: a killing taboo named mental illness
The month of May has never been a favourite of mine.
I don’t hate it because because it’s still too early to prepare a birthday party that three people will attend — I am terrible at organising things and my birthday is in July, so I never win — and I don’t hate it either because it’s hay fever time, even though hay fever sucks. May has stopped being a favourite of mine when a very distant relative I grew fond of in my most cruel years, died of an agressive form of cancer that took her away in the span of a few weeks. It was hell and I suffered her loss like I never thought I would. It was seven years ago and it took me years to be able to speak about her without feeling the need to cry or wanting to trade my vapid existence for hers, because she did a lot of great things in 43 years and I was a nobody at 23 3/4 who did not have the talent of a Hunter S. Thompson and who relied too much on Twitter to get shit done.
I tried to find solace into the virtual friends I had then, all I had was scorn. Some Becky was complaining that I was making a big deal out of it, another Becky complained that I was a Debbie Downer (there are no French equivalent and those weren’t her words, but since I don’t speak Becky or passive aggressive, this is what I gathered) and it went on and on with more patriarchal princesses trying to explain to me how to process grief in a way that is acceptable on bloody Twitter. I was furious that no one wanted to acknowledge my pain and despair. That’s when it hit me: of course, they don’t want me to be depressed, it just doesn’t fit the narrative. Black people cannot have breakdowns, they can be angry or sassy but not depressed.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present you EXHIBIT A: moi!
My first recollection of me having a breakdown was when I was four years old. I was in pre-school (or maternelle) and I was a bright child who loved reading books. You read it correctly, I knew how to read by then and it wasn’t a biggie for me. It was a huge biggie for the teachers because they never imagined a Black kid born from an illiterate immigrant mother being so eloquent and they treated me like I was a sideshow freak. I wasn’t a freak to the other kids but I knew they saw me like one, so when something wasn’t going like I planned (and I planned EVERYTHING back then), I would go into a fit of rage and panic because I wanted to destroy anything that wasn’t right or fair and I wanted to disappear too. That didn’t go well with my parents who punished me for having a panic attack. Needless to say that the morning after, I was frowned upon like the monster I refused to incarnate and that feeling of mutual mistrust never left either of us.
By the time I entered primary school, my headteacher at the time knew about what they called my antics and warned me that she wouldn’t let that happen in her school. That woman frightened me and got me even more anxious about going to school. Every time I felt frustrated about a situation I was neither responsible for nor okay with, I would scream my discontent. Because that’s how I grew up, by being incredibly angry and anxious about being finger pointed at for things I had no control over and yet being told it was all my fault. Black Catholic parenting at its best, isn’t it? And every time it happened, the same circus would take place: I would yell, the teacher would yell back, I would try to escape the humiliation, the class goes into laughter, I throw things and tell them to shut up, I get detention, the teacher talks to my mum, Mum would whoop my arse and tell Dad (whenever he was around) who would beat me up quite badly, I’d go to bed bruised and shaken and would go back to school the morning after with long sleeved shirts and a metaphorical cone of shame. No wonder, I developed personality disorders over time.
When primary school was over, I left soothing coping mechanisms, a much nicer and understanding headmistress and a visceral fear of the unknown. I was going to be 11 the week after and nothing had prepared me from the disaster middle-school (or collège) would be. It was what I explained to you multiplied by an entire class of 35 pupils, all my teachers, the headmistress who made no secret of her hatred for the “jeune de banlieue” and the other kids in other classes. I didn’t survive those four years in one piece. There was too much pain, too much grief for people I cared about who died too soon, too much guilt from doing everything I could for my family despite being a front-row spectator of its destruction thanks to my father’s own temper tantrums, too much of me wanting desperately to be loved and nobody around who really did. That’s how depression came to my life when I was 13.
I want to make the clear distinction between being depressed and being depressed. Being depressed means you’re sad because your loved one left you for another; being depressed means you’re sad and you don’t know why, I mean, sure, your loved one left for a new flame and it’s surely your fault because you did nothing to prevent that to happen and of course, S.O. was never going to be with you, I mean, look at you! you’re ugly! you’re fat! you’re weird! you’re dumb! Be more like him, act more like her, they have a better life than you ever will, you will never be happy, you don’t deserve to be happy, I think you and I both agree with the fact that the world would be a better place without you, you’re a waste of space, maybe you should just kill yourself, yeah?!
See where I’m coming from. It’s that violent, that instantaneous.
Depression is way more than a sneaky saboteur that can annihilate anything you ever cared about, depression will do just that because it can. Depression discriminates, not like race or gender does but it discriminates you as a human being for being human, flawed, illogical, undeserving. Depression is the total arsehole that will eat your joys and accomplishments and make it all about him. Depression is a poison that burns every inch of you, inside and out, feeding itself from the trauma of your past, your parents’ pasts and their parents’ pasts. Depression is the relative that you hate so much it makes you a little bit racist. And yet, in 2020, there are still some people out there thinking that Black people — and ethnic minorities in general — cannot fall into the tropes of mental illness. Since we are in the midst of Mental Health Awareness Month in the United Kingdom, I wanted to write something to make you understand why it is so important for the BAME community to talk about mental illness and to make sure this is no longer a taboo…
When you look online for the words “depressed woman”, the chances that you find a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic woman are slim. I tried, I saw three light-skinned woman and that was it. When you google “angry woman”, you can see BAME women, darker skinned and smiling. Yeah, pretty gross I know. Even trying to get some information about the BAME community and mental illness, you will find things like this: “In some communities, mental health problems are rarely spoken about and can be seen in a negative light. This can discourage people within the community from talking about their mental health and may be a barrier to engagement with health services”. That was taken from the website of the Mental Health Foundation, a British charity that does a lot of work about prevention and support for adults in the workplace and of disadvantaged areas suffering of mental illnesses and personality disorders. That very sentence is a no-brainer when it comes to certain communities that simply refuse to talk about mental health because it’s sooooooo “first world problems”. The very fact that BAME groups are less likely to report accessing mental health treatment than White British people is a staggering one and it all comes down to “what will my family say”. I mean, I had aunties telling me that I didn’t need medication or therapy but an exorcism and Jesus, so none of this surprises me.
It is hard at this point to find proper evidence on why does the BAME community refuses to allow those shackles of shame to be broken and why it is so hard for those who do to find culturally appropriate methods to tackle the sources of traumas. On the other hand, it is easy in the UK to find articles like this one proving once more that the BAME community has an epidemic of its own but little to no resources to get the help they need apart from a struggling NHS, fighting day in and day out for its own survival. In 2014, a research study for the charity Time to Change found that “93 per cent of people from Black and Minority Ethnic communities who have mental health problems face discrimination because of them”, the most commons being “shunned by people that know they have a mental health problem” (68%), “finding” and “keeping a job” (68 and 67% respectively). They also report that 32% of those they have interrogated “also say they were treated less favourably by their own communities because of their mental illness due to various social and cultural reasons”. THAT WAS SIX YEARS AGO! You know what used to be a thing six years ago? Macklemore! That’s how appalling that shit is. Macklemore had the time to invade the parties of shallow twenty-somethings, be called out for the fool he was and begone into oblivion and yet, it’s still impossible for some family members of mine to admit that they wish to speak with a therapist.
It would be so simple to justify this practice of keeping yourself to yourself because of how our immigrant parents raised us. They were surely telling us stories of how harsh their lives were, back home, with no money, little food and inexistant life prospects for a career. Some of us might have parents that never went to school, for whatever reasons they had and that’s okay. It was a different time with different mores and surely little girls weren’t given any opportunity of education because the patriarchal system they lived under gave those little girls only two choices: be a housewife or be a mother. Some of us might also have parents who had to work in farms and fields very early because agricultural advancements didn’t reach your great-grandfather’s crops at the time and they needed to eat, by all means. Some of us might have parents who witnessed the carnage of civil wars, independence wars, inter-religious wars at a time when children their age learn the days of the week. And what our forefathers see as “precious life lessons”, future generations — including ours — see it as an inter-generational trauma that is being passed on inadvertently. Reluctantly, even. The world does not need more lava-like trauma spuds, we got enough of them already, thank you.
If you add on top of this the systemic racism, xenophobia and classism that the second or third-generation immigrants faced, the patriarchy in all its glory that gave us mega-hits like “Slut-Shaming”, “Domestic Violence Is Totally Okay” and “Nice Guys (The Rape Culture Blues)” and the frenzied medias who just can’t get enough of sordid stories about people that don’t look like you/them, obviously you are going to create monsters. Big bully monsters, scapegoated monsters, patriarchal monsters, xenophobic monsters with a high propension of violence and at the very bottom of that list: BAME kids, ready to be eaten alive by those same monsters. The monsters did not eat me in the end, since I am talking to you, but a personality disorder is chewing me up every time I struggle to cope with my own self-destructive emotions.
The worst part of suffering from a mental illness is that overwhelming feeling that you are invisible, that your fears are being invalidated and/or dismissed. The infamous storm in a teacup. That’s why loads of people from every walk of life is hesitant of ever mentioning their emotional distress to a friend, a relative or even a GP. That also include BAME and LGBTQ+ folks, sadly. You remember when I was talking earlier of a “metaphorical cone of shame”, that is exactly it. It’s there and you can’t miss it, it’s right in your face and yet, it’s not really there either because no one else can see it and therefore, you must making this up. Mental illness come with a cone of shame so sophisticated, it takes years to find the right name to call it, batteries non included.
Mine has three letters and has been made cool by people like Marilyn Monroe, Angelina Jolie and Pete Davidson. It also comes with a ton of shit such as low self-esteem, clinginess in relationships, excessive anger, mood swings, intense sense of shame, substance abuse, self-medication, erratic behaviour, fear of failure, fear of abandonment, inability to process extreme emotions, and so on... These things can hit you anytime in your life, and it will hit you hard, no matter where you come from, the real problem is when all those things hit you at once and cripples you completely.
That would be so simple indeed if the BAME community wasn’t already being discriminated for “exaggerating symptoms” (yes, I saw that two days ago on the comment section of an article about the BAME community being particularly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK). Not sure the family of Naomi Musenga would appreciate (read about it here and here). It is for stories like these that let the mistrust between BAME communities and the rest of the world growing ever more. It’s not going to make our nephews and nieces less prone to mental illness, it’s just going to put them in greater danger in the long term by staying silent.
Black people are 40% more likely to access treatment through a police or criminal justice route, less likely to receive psychological therapies, more likely to be compulsorily admitted for treatment, more likely to be on a medium or high secure ward and be more likely to be subject to seclusion or restraint (Mind)
How long will this last until the BAME community as a whole can finally get the help they need with no discrimination or sense of shame being part of the picture? What can the society can do to make sure that anyone who suffers a mental condition can have the help and support they need in a timely fashion (once again, most of us wished to not have to rely so much on the NHS but not every therapist is affordable nor available in the most demanding working areas)? I think the solution is more complex that I would like it to be, but we can all start by ending the perpetual stigmatising and romanticising of mental illness.
There is nothing more annoying that being called “crazy” by some random whatever whose opinion was unsolicited. It’s even worse when your close circle tag you as the “crazy one” because they are sort of aware of your “silly anxiety”. It almost makes you feel like you shouldn’t try or even dare to have friendly interactions with anyone, as if the world was divided in a war between the “normies” and the “crazies”. And if you try to look into pop culture to find some comfort, you’ll find tons of books, movies and sitcoms where insanity is shown as being cute but frightening and looking pretty much like Winona Rider. Well, I got bad news for you: crazy people are not interchangeable, there are not cute — they are humans, not Furbys, there are no such thing as crazies or normies, people with mental health issues are not defined by their condition and they certainly are not looking like Winona Rider. Leave Winona alone, for fuck’s sake! And now, the weather forecast.
There were attempts to talk about mental health in BAME communities like when FOX’s Empire show us how Andre (played by Trai Byers) is coping with his bipolar disorder while his own father, Luscious Lyon (played by Terrence Howard) is dismissing it like something too shameful to be dealt with by a bona fide professional because of this myth of the “strong Black man” he built himself upon and tried to replicate to his own sons. The fact that Andre is bipolar makes him a lesser Black man to Luscious’s eyes, just like his own mother, Leah, was a lesser woman because her own mental illness made her a bad mum to him. That was a great attempt to discuss mental health and show them to the target audience of the show (Black families) what mental health is really about when you dust it off for too long. That attempt had been thwarted over time because of the storylines going nowhere and Jussie Smollett being a fucking idiot. That was the only time in decades that I have seen on telly mental illness being talked about as it should. I simply cannot remember any other show, movie or story from a minority ethnic person of any age, social status, gender or religious background, dealing with mental illness and explaining why it is so damn hard to be heard, seen or at least understood.
I’m in my thirties, I’m still waiting. I wish I wasn’t and in the meantime, I will still try to find my way into this world where I am far more than my traumas, my condition and/or my diagnostic. There are so many ways I present myself and one of them is Black. I can’t brush off my origins because it doesn’t fit the standards of my community, just like I am absolutely not going to pretend one second that I don’t suffer from anything in order to make people around me more comfortable. Hey, I’m the one having a shit time right here, I should be made comfortable, not the other way round, bitches! I’m spending over £35 on medication, I’m having difficulty sleeping at night. If you want to be more comfortable around me, find me a good therapist that doesn’t cost me a liver or at least, elect competent people that won’t make it so hard for anyone to get therapy in the first place.
I wish there were more stories being told about how to raise awareness about mental health, personality disorders, psychoses and even suicide within the BAME community or simply stories for lonely kids from grim places that could show them that they are not alone and that they can thrive too if given the chance to express their anxieties freely. I also wish I don’t have to find myself obliged to discuss these matters every time Mental Health Awareness Month shows up because it’s still fucking taboo to admit that #depressedwhileblack is real (not a whim, not a mistake, not an anomaly, a REAL THING!). It is exhausting to talk about these issues on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and have no other back-up that the one other friend who also has depression. The back-up should come from science and prominent personalities within the communities involved, so me and my friend can breathe a little.
I’m simply asking for a wider conversation to happen, in France, in the United Kingdom, in every immigrant community and household, so when schools will be safe to be re-opened, a four-year-old can be spared of that overwhelming feeling of guilt that comes with a panic attack and the sense that this might be the beginning of the end.
Here are a list of useful numbers in the UK:
- Anxiety UK: 03444 775 774 (Monday to Friday, 9.30am to 10pm; Saturday to Sunday, 10am to 8pm)
- CALM: 0800 58 58 58 (daily, 5pm to midnight)
- Mind: 0300 123 3393 (Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm)
- NSPCC: 0800 1111 for Childline for children (24-hour helpline), 0808 800 5000 for adults concerned about a child (24-hour helpline)
- Papyrus HopelineUK, young suicide prevention society: 0800 068 4141 (Monday to Friday, 10am to 10pm, and 2pm to 10pm on weekends and bank holidays)
- Samaritans: 116 123 (free 24-hour helpline)
- Sane / SANEline: 0300 304 7000 (daily, 4.30pm to 10.30pm)
