Black Mental Health is taboo topic in the black community. Black Americans are not known for suicide or being classified as drug addicts. These are getaway’s that other races in America utilize, once they became mentally ill.
What are known mental illnesses in the black community? Post-traumatic stress disorder & post traumatic slave syndrome. PTSD is a disorder that some people develop after experiencing a shocking, scary, or dangerous event. Post traumatic slave syndrome is a set of behaviors, beliefs and actions associated with or, related to multi-generational trauma experienced by Black Americans that include but are not limited to undiagnosed and untreated (PTSD) in enslaved blacks and our descendants.
Because Black American ancestors were raped, tortured, brainwashed, broken down, mentally defeated & put on display for entertainment. The descendants of these victims live today. This ill punishment of blacks, still exist in modern day society genetically, mentally & physically.
Social media is a good way to combat depression or mental illness. Why so? Because the lack of outside recognition and acknowledgment are responsible for the perception of one’s individual’s sense of self. Social media platforms like Instagram or YouTube, provide a person with an audience, who can appreciate their thoughts, and energy.
Black Americans have always made social media popular. By Sharing mental images, memories, customs, or habits, these factors link black people together who don’t know each other. When black Americans share our experience that is associated with a specific place such as reservation, ancestral homeland, or sacred site. Social media helps blacks interact with each other. The interaction of blacks communicating, increases the dopamine, and decreases levels of stress.
Just look how happy black people are, when we listen to our music, watch movies that represents us well, dance, sing and enjoy each other’s spirits. Even certain slave plantations on the south, they would dance & celebrate on the weekend, and even created a dances like” the cakewalk”. Michael Jackson would pay homage to the “cakewalk” in his video thriller. Other dances like the Ring Shout and Juba (Giouba) dances were performed on slave plantations. Proving that blacks enjoying black culture was a form of medicine, back then and now.
Research has shown that Black Americans are more religious than White Americans, because at church, it’s a group environment, where blacks are sending black mental & spiritual energy to each other. Church was relied on as a way of coping with mental health services.
Not all people agree that Christianity, helped Black Americans with mental illness.
In his book, The Black Clergy’s Misguided Worship Leadership, writer and lecturer Christopher Bell Jr., who has a doctorate in education, argues that “‘Jesus worship’ is equivalent to ‘white male worship’ and is detrimental to the mental and emotional health of black people.” He asserts:
“The Jesus worshiping (white male worshiping) culture of the black community subliminally afflicts many black people with a deleterious white superiority syndrome that leads to low self-esteem, self-hate, psychological dissonance, and emotional and spiritual depression resulting in aberrant and self-injuring behavior or self-limiting beliefs such as low academic achievement motivation among black adolescents, mutual alienation between black men and women, increased feelings of hate toward whites and other blacks, and increased stress and other health related problems in black males.”
Bell adds that “the Jesus worshiping” also “reinforces the oppressive racist notion of white male superiority in the same ways as white racial discrimination and racial aggression.”
One of the main reasons none blacks commit suicide more than black Americans is because of the working pineal gland found exclusively in African Americans. According to science, most Europeans are born with a calcified pineal gland. The pineal gland is responsible for secreting two extremely vital brain fluids related to our mental health. Those are, melatonin, which is the hormone that induces sleep, and serotonin, which is the chemical that helps to maintain a happy, healthy balanced mental state of mind, among other functions. In other words, a Black person with a working Third eye can handle mental trauma better than all other human beings, who have calcified pineal glands.
Research shows that black women report lower levels of body dissatisfaction than other racial groups. Black women usually have a higher self-esteem than their White, Asian or Latino peers. White girls are raised to be more dependent and accepting of traditional gender roles than African-American girls who are more likely to be socialized to be independent and self-reliant. Because of this, Black women have a higher self-esteem and fewer mental health issues.
My personal opinion is, yes Black Americans suffer from mental illness, maybe more than all other Americans because of atrocities associated with our history. However, I believe due to genetics, Black Americans can cope with mental illness better than our euro, Asian counter parts. The fact you didn’t see a mass suicide on any plantation or even in today’s prisons, is proof black people are mentally resistant to the very things that white Americans commit suicide over every year.
