Raising Black Children: Two Leading Psychiatrists Confront the Educational, Social and Emotional Problems Facing Black Children, by James P. Comer, MD & Alvin F. Poussaint (1992)
Two of America’s most trusted and respected authorities on child care—provide answers to nearly 1000 questions on the problem of raising African-American children. “A necessary addition to all parenting and parent-teacher collections.”—Library Journal.
Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans Revised Edition, by Alvin F. Poussaint, MD & Amy Alexander (2011)
Through stories (including their own), interviews, and analysis of the most recent data available, Dr. Alvin Poussaint and journalist Amy Alexander offer a groundbreaking look at ‘posttraumatic slavery syndrome,’ the unique physical and emotional perils for black people that are the legacy of slavery and persistent racism. They examine the historical, cultural, and social factors that make many blacks reluctant to seek health care, and cite ways that everyone from the layperson to the health care provider can help.
Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting, by Terrie M. Williams. (2009)
Terrie Williams knows that Black people are hurting. She knows because she’s one of them.
Terrie had made it: she had launched her own public relations company with such clients as Eddie Murphy and Johnnie Cochran. Yet she was in constant pain, waking up in terror, overeating in search of relief. For thirty years she kept on her game face of success, exhausting herself daily to satisfy her clients’ needs while neglecting her own.
Terrie finally collapsed, staying in bed for days. She had no clue what was wrong or if there was a way out. She had hit rock bottom and she needed and got help.
She learned her problem had a name — depression — and that many suffered from it, limping through their days, hiding their hurt. As she healed, her mission became clear: break the silence of this crippling taboo and help those who suffer.
Black Pain identifies emotional pain — which uniquely and profoundly affects the Black experience — as the root of lashing out through desperate acts of crime, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, workaholism, and addiction to shopping, gambling, and sex. Few realize these destructive acts are symptoms of our inner sorrow.
Black people are dying. Everywhere we turn, in the faces we see and the headlines we read, we feel in our gut that something is wrong, but we don’t know what it is. It’s time to recognize it and work through our trauma.
In Black Pain, Terrie has inspired the famous and the ordinary to speak out and mental health professionals to offer solutions. The book is a mirror turned on you. Do you see yourself and your loved ones here? Do the descriptions of how the pain looks, feels, and sounds seem far too familiar? Now you can do something about it.
Stop suffering. The help the community needs is here: a clear explanation of our troubles and a guide to finding relief through faith, therapy, diet, and exercise, as well as through building a supportive network (and eliminating toxic people).
Black Pain encourages us to face the truth about the issue that plunges our spirits into darkness, so that we can step into the healing light.
You are not on the ledge alone.
Can I Get a Witness?, by Julia A. Boyd. (1998)
With the intimacy, insight and wisdom that have won her a loyal following, psychotherapist Julia A. Boyd sounds a wake-up call about an issue of major importance: Black women and depression. Studies show that one in five women suffers from depression, but many don’t recognize the signs and so don’t report their symptoms to their doctors. With Can I Get a Witness?, Boyd gives witness to the tragedies that result, and to the fact that recovery from the “beast” is possible. Boyd draws from a wealth of experience–her own battles with depression and those cases in her “sister circle”–to take a hard and honest look at the signs and the options for healing. By relying on the voices of her sisters, Boyd lays bare a multiplicity of truths about the faces of depression–helplessness, dissatisfaction, illness, loss, addiction, anger–and offers strategies for tough times, exercises for recovery, and answers to the most often asked questions.
Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America, by Charisse Jones & Kumea Shorter-Gooden (2004)
Based on the African American Women’s Voices Project, Shifting reveals that a large number of African American women feel pressure to com-promise their true selves as they navigate America’s racial and gender bigotry. Black women “shift” by altering the expectations they have for themselves or their outer appearance. They modify their speech. They shift “White” as they head to work in the morning and “Black” as they come back home each night. They shift inward, internalizing the searing pain of the negative stereotypes that they encounter daily. And sometimes they shift by fighting back.
With deeply moving interviews, poignantly revealed on each page, Shifting is a much-needed, clear, and comprehensive portrait of the reality of African American women’s lives today.
Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith, by Monica A Coleman. (2016)
Monica A. Coleman’s great-grandfather asked his two young sons to lift him up and pull out the chair when he hanged himself, and that noose stayed in the family shed for years. The rope was the violent instrument, but it was mental anguish that killed him. Now, in gripping fashion, Coleman examines the ways that the legacies of slavery, war, sharecropping, poverty, and alcoholism mask a family history of mental illness. Those same forces accompanied her into the black religious traditions and Christian ministry. All the while, she wrestled with her own bipolar disorder.
Bipolar Faith is both a spiritual autobiography and a memoir of mental illness. In this powerful book, Monica Coleman shares her life-long dance with trauma, depression, and the threat of death. Citing serendipitous encounters with black intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Angela Davis, and Renita Weems, Coleman offers a rare account of how the modulated highs of bipolar II can lead to professional success, while hiding a depression that even her doctors rarely believed. Only as she was able to face her illness was she able to live faithfully with bipolar.
Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression, by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah. (1998)
The first book to focus on black women and depression, seen through the personal journey of a young black woman’s descent into despair.
Meri Danquah, a “working-class broke,” twenty-two-year-old single mother, began to suffer from a variety of depressive symptoms after she gave birth to her daughter, which led her to suspect that she might be going crazy. Understanding the importance of strength in a world that often undervalues black women’s lives, she shrouded herself and her illness in silence and denial. “Black women are supposed to be strong—caretakers, nurturers, healers of other people—any of the twelve dozen variations of Mammy,” writes Danquah. But eventually, she could no longer deny the debilitating sadness that interfered with her ability to care for her daughter, to pursue her career as a writer, and to engage in personal relationships. “This is how the world feels to me when I am depressed,” she writes. “Everything is blurry, out of focus, fading like a photograph; people seem incapable of change; living feels like a waste of time and effort.”
She moves back to the city of her childhood where she befriends two black women who are also suffering from depression. With their support she confronts the traumatic childhood events—sexual abuse, neglect, and loss—that lie beneath her grief. This is not simply a memoir about depression, it is a powerful meditation on courage and a litany for survival.