About a month ago, I wrote an article on Drake’s diss track towards Kid Cudi. In that article, I expressed my disappointment that Drake would use Cudi’s mental health issues as a way to insult him. Recently, J. Cole released a new track titled “False Prophets” which some people are assuming is a diss track geared towards Kanye West. In case you did not know the situation of Kanye’s health, he was recently admitted to Los Angeles’s Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and placed under observation after suffering from exhaustion and sleep deprivation.
In the track “False Prophets,” Cole calls out “a star” who’s “falling apart but we deny it.” Analyzing the lyrics, it seems to be pointing to Kanye West. “He tell us he a genius but it’s clearer lately // It’s been hard for him to look into the mirror lately,” Cole raps. Does that sound like anyone we know? There just might be a rapper who is undergoing a serious mental health crisis. But at least Cole isn’t being completely heartless, admitting that “Well fuck it, what’s more important is that he’s cryin out for help.” Now whether or not you believe this track is about Kanye, I am not here to argue with you. This is not going to be another article about “kicking a man while he is down.”
Let’s take a look at the system, let’s take a look at mental health, and let’s take a look at the relationship of the two and people of color.
There is a lack of visibility of people of color when discussing mental illness. There are people of color who do not believe there is such a thing as mental illness or they rely on the church and will pray for an end to their depression. Dr.Poussaint of the Judge Baker Children’s Center at Harvard Medical School stated, “[There’s] a wall of silence about depression and suicide in the black community, but I think it goes beyond stigma. … (Many) African-Americans, perhaps more than white Americans, see being depressed as a personal weakness. And then many of them don’t see it as a health problem at all. They see it as something that occurs in life. After all, black people invented the blues, which is now a substitute term or synonym for depression among many people.”
In Samantha Irby’s article “Black Girls Don’t Get to Be Depressed”, she describes that when she finally got help for she mental illness, she felt as if she was letting Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman down by talking about what she felt were silly little feelings. Here is the introduction from the article about her experience:
- “When I was young I was frequently described as ‘moody.’ Or dismissed as ‘angry.’ According to the social worker who routinely pulled me out of class, I was intellectually bright but ‘quietly hostile.’ Never mind that I was basically living in squalor with my mother’s half-dead body, subsisting on the kind of cereal that comes in a 5-pound bag and whatever meals were being served for free hot lunch; I was diagnosed as having ‘an attitude problem.’ So I rocked with that. When you’re a kid, it’s sometimes just easier to go along with other people’s definitions of who you are. They’re adults, right? So they’re smarter? I would listen to this Faith No More tape on my Walkman (do young people understand what those words even mean) over and over while sulking and looking morose, or whatever it is poor kids do when we have no access to semiautomatic firearms or prescription drugs. It was the only thing I could do to make it to the next day.”
- “No one in my house was talking about depression. (…) Sigh. So I was (1) super (f***ing) depressed, (2) super (f***ing) depressed with no one to talk to about it who wasn’t going to immediately suggest child services remove me from my home, and (3) super (f***ing) depressed while clocking in on the low end of my skinfolk’s negrometers because I identified hard with Courtney Love and read Sassy magazine. Depression seemed like just another way I was desperately trying to be white.”
A few quotes from “People Of Color Discuss Their Experiences With Mental Illness” an article published by The Huffington Post:
- “’When you google images of mental illness, there’s usually only one representation and that’s white women,’ Vargas says.”
- “’I’ve lived with a mental illness most of my life, and I decided that this is something I wanted to tackle,’ Vargas said. ‘I want people to see people who look like them. And to see family members and their community and say, ‘That’s something that pertains to me’ and ‘I’m not the only one.’”
- “’I realized that mental illness runs in both sides of my family,’ Yirssi Bergman, who suffered from depression, says in the video. ‘As a culture, Dominican people just don’t discuss [mental illness]. And, maybe I’m generalizing, but I think a lot of people of color just don’t discuss [it].'”
From another article, “Stigma haunts mentally ill Latinos”:
- “‘When Latinos think of mental illness, they just think one thing: loco,’ says Clara Morato, whose son, Rafaello, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 18. ‘[Latinos] don’t want to be labeled, and they don’t want to be labeled as the family with a relative who’s crazy.'”
- “‘They feel they have to resolve issues themselves,’ (says Jane Delgado, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and the president of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health.) ‘They don’t want to be a burden.’ If Latinos do seek care, more often than not it will be from a clinic or general practitioner rather than a specialist. ‘They won’t say, ‘I’m depressed,’’ Vega says. ‘Many Hispanics will go to the primary health-care clinics and complain about physiological symptoms.’”
As a woman of color and college student with no credentials except for her life experience, I can say that reading these articles did not surprise me. They seem to correspond with everything I have seen, heard, felt and done in relation to mental illness. Too many people brush it off, ignore it, and deny it. Let us face this taboo of the “mental illness”. Let us accept that it is real and not a myth. Let people of color realized that mental illness knows no age limits, economic status, race, creed or color. Mental illness can strike anyone at any time.
The sooner people of color can do this, the sooner we can get to work on healing ourselves.