But if you take them some good food, that shows that you’re meeting them where you are, that you care about them, that you’re doing the best you can. When people are struggling, the last thing they’re trying to do is eat. WIB: For people who know someone who’s in a mental health crisis, what is one thing they can do to support the person in need? But instead of calming down, like, “OK, let me just go sit down somewhere,” we persist and work ourselves to death. And a lot of that stress is associated with depression and with anxiety. You’ve got to release some of this stress. So, the doctor might say, you’ve got hypertension, high blood pressure.

So we’re overcoming stereotypes and killing ourselves in the meantime. RW: John Henryism speaks to the determination in which we basically work ourselves to death in order to demonstrate that we’re not lazy. Sherman Jones and how it shows up in the Black community today?

WIB: Speaking to our resilience as a people who’ve had to live and work under stressful conditions, can you talk about the John Henryism theory coined by Dr. And I think it runs out for us more so than for others because of the generations of resilience. Like it’s gotten us this far, but that resilience runs out. The other part is just us being a really incredibly resilient people - which is a good thing. And things don’t have to get that bad if we are willing to just get help sooner. It’s just that we kind of carry it a little bit further and a little bit longer than we need to.Īnd so we’re more likely to get help in the emergency department or emergency room, rather than engage in preventative care. RHEEDA WALKER: We are uncomfortable with anything that’s called mental health because we associate mental health with what it means to be “crazy” or to be “weak.” And that’s not to say that that’s not true in other communities. But what have you found to be unique about Black people’s mental health struggle?ĭR. Walker, people of all ages and ethnicities are experiencing mental health crises in the U.S.

The unapologetic black mental health