Kids Are Not Okay: Addressing the Mental Health Crisis Affecting Our Youth

Jamal Clay was the form of kid who at all times desired to help people. He was an intuitive soul, and his mother, Rafiah Maxie of Chicago, called him her “right hand.” Jamal often woke his mother up early so she could drop him off in school before the morning bell and help the teachers prepare the classrooms. At home, he helped Maxie handle her younger sister. “I think there were a lot of times he thought we were both parents,” she recalled. “He was very responsible.” He also had mental health issues – and had for years.

On May 27, 2020, Jamal took his own life of their family home. He was 19 years old. My sister found it hanging in the garage. At age 12, he used the same karate belt he utilized in his suicide attempt. During this time, Maxie and the doctors attributed Jamal’s mental state and low self-esteem to being bullied, and he was diagnosed with single-stage depression.

Attempts to proceed treatment with therapy were unsuccessful because Jamal’s providers weren’t making the agreed-upon home visits, had retired, or weren’t contacting him or Maxie. “There was definitely a sequence of events that let us down,” Maxie says. “We were left to deal with it ourselves and find a way to deal with it, even though we didn’t really have the resources or the ability.”

Maxie believes that when the pandemic began, months of isolation resulting from quarantine pushed her son to a dark place. He also believes that the murder of George Floyd, which occurred two days before Jamal’s suicide, caused psychological trauma. “And social media itself has an impact,” Maxie says. “It can almost take away your entire self-esteem and tear it to pieces.”

In recent years, social media has develop into a dominant force amongst young people ages 13 to 17, who divide their time between Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok, based on data from the Pew Research Center. The latter is currently the most often used application by teenagers – they spend a mean of 105 minutes on it a day. Research conducted in 2018 showed that 95 percent teenagers had access to a smartphone, and 45 percent admitted that they’re online almost continuously. Research has shown the negative impact of viewing racially-related traumatic events online on the mental health of teenagers of color. Social media has also been found to be particularly harmful to young people who find themselves vulnerable to or suffer from mental disorders. Maxie believes this had a negative impact on her son. Because of this, “I don’t think he would be able to say, ‘It’s OK. Everything will be alright. “Life will be okay,” Maxie says.

Ongoing crisis

Dr. Kamala Uzzell, a psychotherapist based in Durham, North Carolina, began her practice in 2009 with the goal of normalizing counseling for people of color. “If patients see a therapist who looks like them, they may think,” Uzzell says. “Even before I opened my practice, I heard a standard belief that African Americans didn’t go to therapy. We go to church and pray about it. Or we deny it and say, “It’s not really happening.”

Maya Williams, a 26-year-old nonbinary person from Portland, Maine, grew up coping with the consequences of this denial. “My family was talking about mental health and the conversation turned to ‘growing pains’ or ‘God is not providing you with greater than you’ll be able to handle’ or ‘Are you sure you are praying hard enough?’ says. “Prayer has been helping Black people for years, but at the same time it’s like telling us, ‘Talk to God about it so that you haven’t got to consult with me about it.’ I didn’t feel comfortable talking to my parents and unpacking it until I used to be older.”

Maya saw a college counselor for a yr in eighth grade – around the same time she expressed suicidal thoughts to her mother and two years before her suicide attempt at age 15. Her family didn’t know that she had attempted to take her own life until she was 19 and published an essay about her experiences.

According to the American Psychological Association, African-American teenagers outperform their white and Latino counterparts in suicide attempts. Additionally, between 2001 and 2017, suicide rates amongst African-American adolescent girls increased by 182 percent. Some organizations, reminiscent of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in California, point to untreated mental health conditions as one possible reason for the increase. At the age of 5, the yr her parents divorced, Maya began showing signs of dermatillomania, a repeated urge to choose at her skin – sometimes related to obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, she wasn’t diagnosed with the condition until she was 19, at the same time she was diagnosed with anxiety. And she began taking medications to treat any of her diagnoses until July 2020. “I’ve struggled with mental health issues for a really long time, but now I have to work through new fears,” she says. “So I wanted to try medication to feel the way I want.”

A parent’s nightmare

Although rates of mental illness in African Americans are just like rates in the general population, based on the American Psychiatric Association, just one in three Blacks who need mental health care receive it.

“There are a lot of different resources that didn’t exist three or four years ago,” says Dr. Tia Dole, executive director of the Steve Fund, a corporation that supports the mental health of young people of color. “It takes some persistence, and too often parents wait until their child has an actual crisis. You may notice their withdrawal over the course of months, after which suddenly you see self-harm. The sooner you get in, the faster they’ll improve.

For parents of youngsters over 18, securing treatment for them generally is a Herculean task. This was the case of Atlanta resident Bridget Gipson, whose son, Steven A. Gipson, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2015. Even before his diagnosis, he began to exhibit manic behavior, which is why his mother sought skilled help. But considering Steven was an adult, she needed his cooperation. In September 2014, he left Atlanta and stopped contacting her. She filed a missing individuals report; he was found just a few days later in Miami Beach and brought to a close-by hospital.

“The doctor told me, ‘Your son is here and we’re going to let him go,'” he says. “I begged the hospital to put him in a center where he could receive additional help. They wouldn’t do that. But when Gipson went to Florida to pick up Steven, the hospital wouldn’t release him. “I was devastated,” she says. “They released him back onto the streets of Miami. He went missing again for nearly three months.

In December, Steven returned to Atlanta together with his mother. After being hospitalized, he began taking medication, attending therapy sessions and living in an apartment near Gipson’s home. She even managed to achieve custody of Steven in early 2015, but with restrictions. She couldn’t admit him to hospital unless he posed a danger to himself, and she or he couldn’t force him to take his medications, which he stopped taking in February 2015. A month later, on March 19, 2015, Steven committed suicide. He was 26 years old.

Changing the dialogue

People of color are increasingly discussing mental health and its challenges, but many parents still don’t understand why their child is struggling. “I see a lot of guilt among parents of color,” Dole says. “They think, .”

However, he notes that oldsters have to do away with this sort of pondering. “The underlying causes of mental illness in children and young adults can be the result of a myriad of factors, from environmental to genetic,” he notes. And because each child is exclusive and has a distinct set of circumstances, the signs that they could be struggling present in another way. The neatest thing parents can do is talk, listen, pay close attention and be open to learning.

“Because the therapy wasn’t as accessible and acceptable in Africa
There are many parents and grandparents in the American community who do not believe in their pain,” Uzzell says. “One in four people will experience some type of mental health problem. Maybe it’s not a long-term condition, maybe it’s short-term, but one in four people will experience it. This means that experiencing mental and emotional suffering is normal and we need to start talking about it normally with someone.”

• Steve’s Fund created a special keyword, STEVE, that young POC can text to 741741 to be connected to a trained crisis counselor.

• Souls of Chicago survivorsfounded by Rafiah Maxie, donates the shoes of deceased family members to organizations and other people in need and hosts educational workshops on the importance of mental health assessments.

Chloe Castleberry is a author and editor based in New York. Her works have appeared in , and .