The barriers to mental health care for Black people vary depending on their geographies. On the African continent, mental health has been neglected in its funding and in some places in sub-Saharan Africa, up to 90% of people who live with mental health issues do not receive treatment. Cultural issues compound the lack of funding with the stigma around psychological issues often marginalising those who have mental illnesses.

In the West, Black people’s access to mental healthcare is limited by a lack of diagnosis and thus a limited referral to mental health support services and, upon receiving care, often must contend with racial stressors that serve to re-traumatise. And similarly, to their African counterparts, many Black communities across the West must also navigate the stigmas around mental health.

There has, however, been a significant challenge to the taboo and stigma in the last several years. Particularly in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic, broadcasting of state-sanctioned violence in different parts of the world, and the proliferation of infographics reminding us to check in with ourselves and others, mental illness, wellness, and health have often been centred, at least in online public fora. Mental health advocates across the world are fighting to make sure that the online work translates to material and institutional access to care resources and among them are Black women who are determined to centre Black people in their praxis. 

Guilaine Kinouani

Guilaine Kinouani is a radical psychologist and therapist, and the founder and director of the platform Race Reflections that began as a forum where she shared “reflections and work to influence the way people think about and do equality, justice and liberation.” The platform seeks to disrupt the practices of diversity and inclusion that often reproduce the systems that marginalise Black people and perpetuate racial trauma.

On the other side of trauma, Kinouani’s work over the years has often been focused on helping Black people in the UK, where she is based, and in France, where she was born, navigate, protect and heal from the violence of white supremacy. Years of this work as well as her work as a race and culture consultant and bias trainer for firms has culminated in a book, Living While Black, due to be released in June of this year, aimed to equip Black people with tools to overcome the psychological consequences of racism.

Sitawa Wafula 

Sitawa Wafula is a Kenyan blogger and mental health advocate. Having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and epilepsy and having survived a sexual assault, Wafula found solace in writing on a blog (now turned podcast) that provided mental health resources for 8 years during its run.

“My story is not unique; it is a narrative almost everyone who has a mental health condition in Africa can relate to. The wider community is scared of mental health issues and so surround it in myths or silence,” she said in a piece for OC87 Recovery Diaries. Intimately aware of the isolation that came with her diagnosis, Wafula went on to found “My Mind My Funk,” Kenya’s first free mental health and epilepsy support line, to actively combat the stigmas around mental health in the country. 

Hauwa Ojeifo 

Hauwa Ojeifo hosted Safe Space: The Mental Health Conversation as part of AMAKA’s Our World Festival. “Mental health is still a very taboo topic and the degree to which we talk about it varies in different spaces,” she offered during the discussion, in acknowledgement of the cultural barriers to mental healthcare.

After her experiences of suicidal ideation and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Ojeifo, from Nigeria, founded She Writes Woman, a platform that provides a helpline and details for safe spaces so that people in Nigeria would not have to experience mental illness in silence. Like Wafula, She Writes Woman began as a blog that she used as an outlet for her own experiences. Now, it is a woman-led organisation empowering people to speak openly and shape the narrative about their own mental health experiences. 

Ojeifo received the Gates Foundation Changemaker award in 2020.

Keisha York 

An organisational psychologist, Keisha York has experience in diversity and inclusion work that promotes the holistic wellbeing of employees. While researching and writing her master’s thesis, York noted how Black people were underrepresented in Psychology and Psychiatry professions in the UK. Part of improving the experiences of Black people with mental health services is to decolonise* the field; the risk of racial re-traumatisation is high when mental health workers do not understand or acknowledge mental health services. 

To address the barriers that prevent Black people to develop careers in these professions, founded the Black in Psychiatry and Psychology Network in 2019 that aims to help prospective professionals of racialised identities gain insight on accessing these careers, and ultimately combat the inequalities they face “in accessing treatment, receiving appropriate care, and reaching equal mental health outcomes.”

Bassey Ikpi

In 2019, mental health advocate and former poet Bassey Ipki published her essay collection I’m Telling The Truth, But I’m Lying in which she explores her multiple identities as a Nigerian American immigrant, or mother, or poet while navigating bipolar disorder and anxiety. The collection was a way to give language to experiences that through stigma have been mysticised, the consequences of which can be fatal, as it almost was in her experience in her 20s.

Ikpi had previously founded advocacy organisation The Siwe Project in the aftermath of a loss to promote honest dialogue on mental illness among people of African descent. She also created the online movement #NoShameDay, to encourage people to speak openly on their experiences of mental illness without shame to challenge the stigmas within global Black communities.

The gendered and racialised precarities of Black womanhood— complicated further when other marginalised identities affect the way we navigate the world— make them particularly vulnerable to mental illness. Some other women and organisations that prioritise African and Afro-descendant women in their mental health work include U.S. based Dr Joy Harden Bradford, Sistah Space and Forward in the UK, or the newly founded Mental Health Awareness Club in Windhoek, Namibia. With these pioneers leading the way, Black women are taking their mental health into their own hands and finding community and healing in the knowledge that they are not and have never been alone.