We Need To Keep Talking About Our Mental Health

By Nicole Edry | Think Pieces | April 18, 2022 |

By Nicole Edry | Think Pieces | April 18, 2022 |

COVID has taken so much from us. One of the few things it has given us in return is a deeper measure of honesty with ourselves and others.

I was recently talking to my best friend, Natalie. One of the many reasons we’ve always been close is our shared background. She’s Haitian and I’m half-Dominican. Both of us are women with ties to the Caribbean who have had the, um, interesting privilege of growing up in Connecticut.

After we covered the most pressing matters, like how her kids are doing and when she’s going to send me more cheesecake, we started talking about therapy. About how much better I feel in my own skin now that I do talk therapy and physical therapy every couple of weeks. How going to therapy has empowered me to better manage my anxiety, my depression, and my PTSD. How it has also taught me how to cope with a life filled with a fun, ever-shifting rainbow of chronic pain.

In the middle of our salute to mental health professionals, we made a throwaway joke about how much we wished some of our friends and family would do therapy too. Even before we finished uttering the sentence, we exchanged significant looks and cracked up laughing. Because we knew. With our Black and Brown folks? That cake don’t bake.

We’re not the only ones witnessing this, either. This same insight has been reinforced several times over by other BIPOC and first-gen friends. People who are noticing the same, troubling patterns. Like us, they see the stoic, hard-working, responsible veneer that our societies-within-a-society must maintain at all costs. A shield covered in rot that has become our greatest crutch. As if we long ago put on a mask that we’ve now forgotten is a mask, so it has become our face instead, and left us with traditionalist, frequently toxic notions twined deep within our cultures. In the Hispanic community, this manifests itself in half-spoken hierarchies mostly based on how melanated your skin is, machismo-driven perceptions of women’s roles, and a blunt desire for distance from the LGBTQIA community.

This line of thinking has become an entrenched part of our world, and it is actively hurting us. We feel the need to be “strong” and respectable no matter what, which in turn engenders a dismissive attitude toward mental health. A perspective that clearly denounces therapy or inpatient treatment as a weakness — one that others can indulge if they choose, but never us.

These thoughts don’t sprout in a vacuum, either. Our rotten shield is constantly reinforced and strengthened by broader society and good ol’ fashioned racism. The pressure to be perceived as upstanding and capable citizens doesn’t come from us alone. Immigrants know that we will always be “other,” no matter how long we live here, or how much we embrace our new home. We know that we’re in a country choosing to uplift white supremacy instead of diversity. We know that we’re constantly watched for cracks and that even the smallest mistake can cost us, not only as individuals but also as a people, because despicable public figures with outsize voices will pounce upon even the slightest weakness and wave it around as proof that our kind doesn’t deserve to be seen as human (cough Fox News cough).

This complicated issue is compounded by how our country has always treated mental health like the proudly deranged owner of its very own scarlet letter. No matter what label you carried, as soon as the words “mental health” became associated with you, the way society views you fundamentally changes. This perception was reinforced in Hollywood as well as in our everyday lives. If a character with manic depressive episodes appears, we instantly know that they won’t have a happy ending. They are either the villain or a victim, and never anything in between.

Oscar Isaac actually captures this phenomenon well in a recent visit to promote Moon Knight on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. When discussing his character Steven Grant, he talked about how Steven has Dissociative Identity Disorder. Along with mentioning the sensationalized, violent nature of Hollywood’s treatment of DID to date, he said something that touched upon the core of why these mental health stigmas are so devastating. He said that this series is “a chance to actually talk about how the human mind is its own superpower. There’s this thing that happens when someone at a very young age goes through incredible abuse and trauma, and the brain can fracture in order to help that child survive … it’s incredible.” While I don’t have DID, I am a survivor of childhood trauma who has been forced to hyper-compartmentalize truly terrible things in order to survive. I cannot express how much it meant to see something even remotely resembling my experience lauded as “incredible” by a respected celebrity. As uplifting as it is, it’s also completely shattering because moments like this are so very rare.

The norm is far less kind. That rotting shield I mentioned isn’t the only problem we’re facing. Many such poisonous perceptions, stereotypes, and survivalist tactics have blended together to form a dangerous, immovable clot at the very heart of our people. We can’t afford to be the embodiment of a million different stereotypes about mental health. So we continue on as we always have. Living with the generational knowledge that our communities must carry our own weight, hold it together, and refuse to show “weakness.” With all of that weighing us down, how can we ever be expected to open ourselves up to the vulnerability and social judgment associated with therapy? Nope, better to do what immigrants have always had to do in America. Act amiable, put a huge smile on, and pretend like everything is OK.

Nat and I laugh-cried about the sad state of our world for a minute and moved on to other things. Yet over a week later, that moment has lingered like a strange taste on my tongue. Like so many others, I’ve long accepted this as the status quo. But lately, I’ve been wondering more and more why I’m continuing to accept this instead of finally fighting back. After all, if powerhouse Brown and Black women like Serena, Simone, Naomi, and others can risk it all, why can’t we do the same?

The taboos around mental health and women’s health reverberate throughout the sporting world just as they do within BIPOC and immigrant communities. It’s one of the reasons that the nuanced, layered performance of Sarah Niles as Dr. Sharon and Jason Sudeikis as the eponymous Ted hits so hard in season two of Ted Lasso. Amazing doesn’t even begin to describe how it feels to see mental health not only talked about but also embraced as necessary in such a beloved series. Now, finally, these types of conversations are also echoing throughout the real world. It is huge, and it becomes even more staggering when we look at the legendary women who have been leading this movement.

Serena Williams had to beat the odds associated with Black women giving birth, and save her own damn life. Right from the beginning, it is abundantly clear that this experience was incredibly harrowing for her, and for her family. Not to mention the fact that she’s one of the most famous women around, yet her voice was still dismissed when her life was on the line.

Over and over, Naomi Osaka has had to defend her decision to take a break from French Open press conferences for her own mental health. She expressed this unacceptable struggle to advocate for herself in a moving personal essay for Time, “In my case, I felt under a great amount of pressure to disclose my symptoms—frankly because the press and the tournament did not believe me. I do not wish that on anyone and hope that we can enact measures to protect athletes, especially the fragile ones. I also do not want to have to engage in a scrutiny of my personal medical history ever again. So I ask the press for some level of privacy and empathy next time we meet.”

Unsurprisingly, the press did not honor her wishes and has in fact continued to push this same dangerous tactic with her fellow athletes. Just a few months after the disgusting gauntlet Naomi endured, Simone Biles was put through the ringer. As we all know, she is an incredible woman who has overcome so much to champion us on the world’s greatest stage. And yet she, too, had to defend her choice to take a break and focus on her mental health. Had to explain herself over and over as she was beset by critics who ignored the simple fact that any distractions while flipping several feet in the air could very well prove deadly.

To this day, these real-life superheroes are continuing to share their stories and facilitate this dialogue on the international stage. No matter what it costs them. Even before all of this, they have endured harassment, abuse, microaggressions, and other obstacles beyond reckoning, all while they pushed their minds and bodies beyond their limits in order to carve a path toward immortality. The odds that they have had to overcome are mind-breaking. They have more to lose than anyone else. So their decision to be honest about their struggles with mental and personal health is powerful beyond words. Their fight is also our fight, and we should be cheering them on as loudly as possible.

The courage of these women is beyond anything we deserve. I hope it inspires us all to embrace the same honesty and talk openly about mental health. No matter what community we belong to, or what obstacles we face in doing so. We owe them, and ourselves, no less.