The Weekly Roundup (For The Week of February 18th)

//The Weekly Roundup (For The Week of February 18th)

The Weekly Roundup (For The Week of February 18th)

Check out NAMI Keystone Pennsylvania’s Weekly Roundup, a list of interesting blog posts, online content, and podcasts relating to mental illness and mental health, picked by our staff. In honor of Black History Month, this week’s weekly roundup will focus on African-American and Black narratives on mental illness.

The articles and blogs included on this list do not necessarily represent the views of NAMI.

Local Focus

“Depression is not something a black person necessarily grows up understanding. I didn’t until I had to.” by Jason McKoy for PublicSource (Link)

“Depression will do whatever it can to isolate you from what and who you love. It is irrational and uncompromising. It doesn’t give a damn who you are, how much money you make, what your skin color is, or what god you do or don’t believe in. If it goes unchecked for too long, it can be dangerous.”

“#LetsMakeASEEN: Steel Smiling” Interview with Julius Boatwright for Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Link)

“We take mental health to our people, give them the power to build processes and ultimately empower them to educate our service delivery methods in real time.”

“My Mental Health is Black” by Anonymous for Inside Our Minds (Link)

“At Southwood, I was one of the only black people there. It made me realize that, in my community, mental illness wasn’t something that people talked about. I felt… like I wasn’t sure how to go back and that be okay to talk about in my community. These were all white people, and they were very comfortable to talk about mental illness… it was in their vocabulary. But it wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t something that was in the forefront to talk about in my community.”

Around The Web

“What It’s Like Having PPD As A Black Woman” by Tyrese Coleman for Buzzfeed (Link)

“It took me two years to even acknowledge I’d been depressed after the birth of my twin sons. I wonder how much it had to do with the way I had been taught to be strong.”

“Black Exhaustion” by Pilot Viruet for Medium (Link)

“I think about the future and feel disgustingly, guiltily thankful I was not born with a maternal instinct or any desire for kids; the thought of bringing a black child into a world that actively tries to eliminate black lives leaves me frozen in fear, depressed in a way that even diagnosed depression never prepared me for.”

“On The Realities Of Being A Black Woman With Borderline Personality Disorder” by Christine Pungong for The Fader (Link)

“I later grew up to understand that we live in a world that doesn’t grant black women vulnerability — and that black women everywhere suffer for it immeasurably. It is for this exact reason that I couldn’t admit to myself that I was ill for a very long time. I associated vulnerability with weakness, and as Ghanaian-American writer Meri Nana-Ama Danquah writes in her memoir Willow Weep For Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression, “weakness in black women is intolerable.” In a way, that’s what made my Borderline Personality Disorder an even more terrifying diagnosis — emotional instability is not in the black girl repertoire.”

By | 2018-02-23T19:24:47+00:00 February 23rd, 2018|NAMI Blog|Comments Off on The Weekly Roundup (For The Week of February 18th)

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