White-centricism monopolizes the narrative of mental health. It consumes media representation, access to services/resources, and even community support. Because people of colour (POC) aren’t acknowledged in conversations about mental illness, internalised denial and judgement both as individuals and collectively results. It is this entrenched stigmatisation from within those POC communities that makes it more difficult for us to believe and identify our struggles as mental illness. The numerous tropes, expressions, and labels like the ‘strong Black woman’, and the ‘Asian model minority’ are often used to demonstrate this ideal. These tropes are celebrated in the name of ‘resilience’, always asserting the idea that any vulnerability that stems from mental health is just weakness. These stereotypes disguise themselves as empowering, but beneath their surface are severely damaging. When we deny our emotions, vulnerabilities, pain and suffering, we deny our humanity. We continue to downplay the effects of racial trauma on our psyche and continue to perpetuate the stigma surrounding mental illness in our communities in a self-destructive cycle. However, it’s important to note that POC communities are no more ableist or anti-mental illness than non-POC communities. POC with chronic mental health issues are more oppressed, and part of that oppression is this stigmatisation and denial of our pain.
The system of mental health is different for POC to navigate, and often fails to recognise the intersections of mental health and race, and any other identities we may have. Everything in the mental health system centres on whiteness; white therapists, white researchers, white patients, and when it doesn’t centre on whiteness, the system tries to pack the issues separately: one over here and the other over there. Never acknowledging how deeply the issues are intertwined. The relationship between these intersections and how they contribute to anxiety and depression displays itself in many subtle ways, the trauma being woven into the fabric of our lives. This is being proven by emerging research discussing how ancestral trauma might impact a person’s genes today. Yet when seeking support, these cultural factors are not considered by the people who claim to offer help. Ultimately, this affects our care in the mental health system, and how we see ourselves.
When what’s classified as complementary therapies in the Western world come in the stolen forms of ‘new age culture’, which usually includes some form cultural appropriation that tokenizes and disrespects our beliefs and traditions (herbalism, crystals, meditation, yoga, etc.) it’s hard for many POC to have supportive experiences due to feeling isolated from healing via these colonised frameworks, especially in predominately white locations. When our experiences and identities are only allowed to exist in these conditions, where we’re seen as tiresome if we speak out about our discomfort, where we are erased from histories, our lineages, and from our traditional systems of community, we end up only seeing ourselves through the negative lenses that remain. As mentally ill POC, we are isolated, silenced, and stripped of a sense of belonging, and then we are expected to get well.