I erased everything I had written for this article. When the topic was released, I quickly drafted a piece in one evening. It was a quaint article reflecting on pruning grapevines and how cutting back leads to growth. It encouraged readers to embrace a “self-pruning” season in their own lives. It was simple, thoughtful, and neat.

Rereading the month’s writing prompt before submission, I realized my article truly missed the mark. I was speaking from my privilege. My reflection encouraged readers to pull themselves up by their mental health bootstraps and cut out the vines that are broken in their lives. It was a surface-level article and so out of touch with the realities of the mental health system that I deleted all the text I had written. I know inequity in health care and mental health services exists, but I let what I had categorized as an “easy article to write” get in the way of truly seeing and examining the truth of the mental health sector.  

Raising a Black child in the United States has been an eye-opening experience, especially in terms of understanding whose experience gets believed and who doesn’t. When my son was an infant, friends would share with me about their experiences of being Black in the United States, and I would listen, but I didn’t absorb it. I could hear what they were saying, but I am not sure I ever comprehended it. It never entered my soul until it happened to my child.

The labels put on my child by teachers and neighbors were astounding. At first, the labels of “active” or “won’t sit still” were brushed off as a young child entering school. Then the comments grew serious, as the phrase “You may want to ask your doctor about medication” became commonplace. I simply sloughed it off as comments every parent of an active child hears. It wasn’t until my child turned 11 that a significant shift in the language spoken about my child became life-threatening. It was life-consequential, serious, and extremely toxic and harmful. I began thinking back to all the testimonies I had heard from friends who had experienced this type of trauma firsthand. I had heard it, but never personalized it. It was time for me to take a hard stop and embody what my friends of color had shared.

Resmaa Menakem, in her book, My Grandmother’s Hands, states that “White-body supremacy is always functioning in our bodies. It operates in our thinking brains, in our assumptions, expectations, and mental shortcuts” (Menakem, 2017, pp. 6). There is no reason to underestimate why so many councils and governing bodies declared racism a public health crisis. In June 2023, the CDC declared that racism was impacting the health of people of color living in the United States.  “Experiencing rejection, unfair treatment, or discrimination because of the meanings assigned to race, ethnicity, and skin color affects the odds of experiencing 2 or more chronic conditions concurrently in older adulthood” (Hall,2023, pp. 1).

The way people are viewed directly determines health outcomes. Health treatment and mental health inequity stem from the viewpoints of the medical doctors who bring with them a set of experiences, potentially biased research, and enculturated viewpoints that are ingrained in the medical practitioner.

People of color have been detrimentally over-identified in government institutions for years. The child welfare system, meant to support and uplift children, has dismantled families of color, placing a disproportionate number of Black children into foster care homes. According to the Congressional Black Caucus, “African American/Black children represented 22% of the foster youth population with only 14% of the U.S. Population” (Congressional Black Caucus, 2024). This same disproportionality can be found in school systems. ProPublica showed, “that Black and Latino students together received about 65% of the discipline and made up just 32% of district enrollment” (Cohen & Richards, 2022).

Both data points demonstrate a significant inequity in who is believed and who is punished. The foster care and adoption industry is seen by community members as a place of “help,” while overlooking that they are heavily populated with black children’s bodies and end up causing more trauma.

Cultural norms are so ingrained in our US mental health systems that it is truly difficult for a person to get an accurate diagnosis and specialized treatment that addresses the core need. In the book Counseling Muslims, the authors note that Muslim individuals have a very difficult time getting appropriate treatment because cultural norms and a stigma that has been prevalent since 9/11 have impacted diagnosis and treatment. Common misconceptions about Islam and its impact on the psychological well-being, causing distress between the client and practitioner (Ahmed & Amer, 2012, pp. 4). It is important for practitioners to become culturally sensitive when working with a client to understand the history of their race, religion, treatment, and the generational trauma that occurs in a place like the United States, which may not be a friendly place for all to live and thrive.

In The Deepest Well, Nadine Burke Harris revisits ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), a framework used to measure early exposure to trauma such as abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, and exposure to violence. ACEs research has shown that these experiences are strongly linked to long-term mental and physical health outcomes. “In the United States, the culture puts a lot of stock in personal responsibility. The lifestyle choices you made do have a huge impact on your health; so-called bad behavior does result in increased risks” (Burke Harris, 2018, pp. 41). Connecting ACE scores to physical health is the duty of mental health practitioners to understand how what happens impacts not only mental health, but also physical health. It requires moving beyond traditional narratives presented in society, textbooks, or research and prioritizing the validity of lived experiences.

Recalibrating mental health in the United States is not about asking individuals to do more or try harder. It is about confronting the systems that shape who is believed, who is diagnosed, and who receives care. It requires us to ask, “What happened to you?” instead of defaulting to, “What is wrong with you?”

For me, recalibration began the moment I deleted an article that was easier to write than the truth. It deepened as I began to see, through my child’s experiences, how systems respond differently depending on biases based on identity markers. The real work is harder. It requires listening, unlearning, and choosing to believe experiences that challenge our assumptions, and we begin to see beyond our own experiences.

This is not about individual resilience or self-pruning. It is about systemic responsibility. The place I can commit to start is within me. Starting with ourselves, making shifts in our thinking creates shifts in systems, and stop asking individuals to adjust to broken systems. When individuals shift, systems begin to change.

Recalibration begins when we stop asking people to survive broken systems and start rebuilding systems that allow them to thrive.

References

Ahmed, S., & Amer, M. M. (2012). Counseling Muslims: Handbook of mental health issues and interventions. Routledge.

Cohen, J., & Smith Richards, J. (2022, September 14). State investigation reveals racial disparities in student discipline and police involvement. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/state-investigation-reveals-racial-disparities-in-student-discipline-and-police-involvement

Congressional Black Caucus. (2024, November 27). Black foster youth matter and so do their Black families: A resource guide to improving outcomes for Black youth in foster care. Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. https://www.cbcfinc.org/capstones/child-welfare/black-foster-youth-matter-and-so-do-their-black-families-a-resource-guide-to-improving-outcome-for-black-youth-in-foster-care/#_edn5

Hall JE, Boulware LE. Combating Racism Through Research, Training, Practice, and Public Health Policies. Prev Chronic Dis 2023;20:230167. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5888/pcd20.230167.

Harris, N. B. (2018). The deepest well: Healing the long-term effects of childhood adversity. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.