Join us in the 7th African History Month Conference as Black Mental Health Matters team take on Racism and ,Slavery, Colonialism and its Impacts on Black Mental Health
To what extend do you think past colonial and enslavement injustices against people of African descent have contributed to divisions and deteriorating Black Mental Health?
In order to heal the wounds of History ,psycho-social approaches to healing through self-awareness, understanding, forgiveness and transformation remains key.
The causes of Mental Health disorders are often located in recent but also older and even ancient historical grievances, memories and traumas.
Evidence of racism’s impact on mental health
Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint asked why suicide rates among black males doubled between 1980 and 1995.

In his co-authored book, Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans, which takes its title from a Negro spiritual describing the hardships of the slave system, he argues that one of the reasons for this increase is that African-American young men may see the afterlife as a better place.
Terrie M Williams, clinical social worker in New York. In her book, Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting, she uses powerful personal narratives of blacks from all walks of life to illustrate the high toll of hiding the pain associated with the black experience on mental health.

Joy DeGruy, Portland State University researcher and scholar, has developed “post-traumatic slave syndrome” as a theory for explaining the effects of unresolved trauma on the behaviors of blacks that is transmitted from generation to generation.

DeGruy’s argument may be controversial, but the questions she asked are surely relevant as we try to make sense, for example, of research released in July 2015 showed suicide rates among black elementary school pupils significantly increasing between 1993 and 2012.