I remember the first time I truly heard Kid Cudi rap the lyrics, "He seems alive though he is feeling blue."

I heard "Day 'N' Nite" on many a club's dancefloors, but in my drunken haze, I wasn’t truly listening to the lyrics—not doing much but feeling the beat. But one day while walking, the track came on and his lyrics hit me. I’ve struggled with mental illness since I was a kid, paralyzed by panic attacks before I could articulate what was going on. I would run around my apartment in Queens in circles, scared of a monster that I could not escape—because the monster was inside of me.

I told countless doctors what I was feeling, but no one seemed to listen, so instead, I used my perceived clumsiness to my advantage. Always tall and lanky, it was easy to blame my injuries on my ever growing body. If I was physically hurt and could tell my parents or doctors where, then I would get the attention I needed, the care to maybe make the monster go away.

I’m 27 now, and the monster is still with me. Now, however, I have a diagnosis, the medical verbiage to explain. The road to that knowledge, however, took far too long, and by comparison, was much longer than my white friends. Anyone who has always known that something was wrong, yet couldn’t put the words to it, knows how incredibly amazing it is to have a definition for what they’ve always known was going on.

I was always in trouble at school. My attention span simply could not contend with sitting in a classroom for 45 minutes at a time, learning about figures and number sequences, that for some reason, my brain would continually tell me were different than the ones my teacher and classmates were seeing. I can remember almost every progress report from grade school telling my parents that while I was bright, I seemed to be totally uninterested in my studies and incapable of trying. The moment I thought I was on top of something, it seemed like one hundred new things would creep up on me. I could never conquer my course load because in the time it took me to get what we had learned on Monday, my classmates were on Thursday’s lesson. So, it would pile on and on and on until the weight of it caused my anxiety to shut it all down.

This cycle continued until high school when a series of unfortunate events—my mom’s death being the most unfortunate of them all—allowed for my father’s wife to make it clear that I was not wanted in their house. Most fortunate of the unfortunate was that there was somewhere waiting for me and that somewhere was a Quaker boarding school. It was there that, for the first time in my life, teachers started to pay attention to my learning disorders. I was allowed extra time and given one on one help in the courses that proved to be the hardest for me. But why had it taken until I was 15 for teachers to pay attention to warning signs, that as educators, they are trained to be on top of?

A Yale study conducted in 2016 found that teachers in preschool show “implicit bias” in how they administer discipline. After viewing videos of children interacting with each other in the classroom, they were asked who in the group was showing “challenging behavior.” None of the children were, but guess who 42 percent of the teachers pinpointed? The black boy. Teachers bias, whether subtle or overt, does an insurmountable amount of damage on black students. The study is actually pretty wild, and worth reading in full.

The Internet is a treasure trove of personal essays on mental health, but those who are speaking about their mental health are those that the medical community in America caters to the most: white folks. While all stories on mental health and the steps people have taken to defeat their so called demons are no doubt important, it kills me how few outlets seek out the stories of POC.

When Kehlani attempted suicide early in 2016, the garbage monster of the hip hop community, Chris Brown, took to Twitter to shame her. The master of easily being the worst human at any party, Brown took to Twitter firing off a series of tweets that absolutely no one asked him for, stating, “There is no attempting suicide. Stop flexing for the gram. Doing shit for sympathy so them comments under your pics don’t look bad.”

I hate Chris Brown, and I hate him for doing this to Kehlani, but I am happy that he has provided such a clear example of how in the black community, mental illness is often treated as nothing more than attention seeking behavior (as well as showing how black men often treat the very real troubles of WOC). Black men are often seen as much older than their white/non-black peers, and are therefore not permitted the same kind of carefree existence white boys are. Society simply does not see black bodies as those who are allowed to experience the joys and the growing pains of adolescence. Part of the reason Brown is now the boil on society that he is may very well be that he was never allowed to express his most tender of emotions without being called “soft” or “sweet.”

Both the government and medical professionals in America have historically not only ignored black people, but used them for horrific experiments, the most famous being The Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Hundreds of black men (for the good of science) were, unbeknownst to them, given placebos instead of actual medicine to treat Syphilis. Did I mention this study was conducted by the government? The study took place from 1932 to 1972, and in that time, 28 of the men died from Syphilis, 100 died from Syphilis related illness, and 40 of the subjects' spouses ended up not only contracting the disease, but passing it along during birth to 19 babies. 1972 was not that long ago—your parents and grandparents were alive when this happened, so it makes a hell of a lot of sense that they would want nothing to do with the medical community.

How big is the number of black people who do not seek help for their mental illness? Compared to white people that number is a staggering 40 percent. How could black people trust the medical community when our country has hundreds of years of precedent of not caring about black bodies?

While researching for this piece, the data I found on black mental illness and black healthcare in America was not surprising to me. However, it still cut deep. Everything that I had always speculated about was proven in study after study and in disgusting practice. Most recently, a black woman, fearing that her doctors did not care about her health nor safety, secretly recorded her surgery. What she heard on that tape is what many black folks expect, but is alarming when proven to be true.

My mental health, your mental health, are not figments of our imagination. Taking medicine or seeing a therapist isn’t “white,” it’s right. One of the reasons media representation is so important is because when we see ourselves and can hear our stories, the world becomes a bit smaller, and starts to make a lot more sense. In those moments, we understand that we aren’t “the only.” Similar to when a young black girl sees a WOC running for office, she understands that one day she could do the same. When black writers are given the same space as their white peers to speak openly about their mental health, the results in the black community can be nothing but positive.

In speaking about something and bringing it to light, it allows for us to shed stigma. Mental health can easily be brushed off by the black community as “white people problems,” and that is something that we can blame on both the media and the medical community. But just like so many other barricades that white people have put in our path, this is territory we must explore and conquer. Cudi repeats again and again how his depression is dealt with alone, if only he knew, if only you knew, that so many of us toss and turn laying in bed at night less concerned with the monsters under our beds, but the ones that we can never seem to shake. And instead of silently dealing, we opened up and reached out. Not knowing how others will react is always the hardest part, but knowing that there is a welcome seat at the table for mental illness to be discussed without shame is the least we can all do for each other.

black medicine

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