World Mental Health Day was Monday, October 10, 2022. Mental health is still a big issue in our city. More often than not, mental health is still a taboo subject for communities of color.
Years ago, PA State Senator Vincent Hughes hosted mental health conferences, specifically for people of color–to come out and talk about the challenges from a provider perspective, from the family perspective, and the perspective of some who have mental health challenges. Some of the situations where people end up dead at the hands of police turn out to be cases where the person being questioned or arrested was someone documented with mental health challenges.
Close examination by the school and medical experts, has found that many of the youth we read about in the newspaper or see on the 6 o’clock news have some mental health challenges.
I recently took a two-and-a-half-day mental health course on Zoom that was amazing. Malik Grey, who works for the City of Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health, was the instructor.
Here’s some of what I learned: There’s no single cause for mental health issues. They come from a myriad of life’s roads, from cultural, to social, to family to psychological, to biological. Let me break that down a bit more. In some communities, the culture is to not trust doctors of any kind. There’s a general mistrust of healthcare systems in certain communities. Then from a social perspective, poverty in conjunction with the stigma around mental health, keeps some from reaching out for help when they may know something is wrong.
In some families, stressful life events prompt you to seek out therapy. There’s also the psychological part of this subject. People can have learning disorders or mental health concerns due to abuse or trauma. And of course, there’s biological, as in a family history of chronic medical conditions.
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