August Book Club: What Becomes of the Brokenhearted by E. Lynn Harris

[1browngirl]

Originally posted by ClassyLady
Throughout this memoir, Harris writes of his recurrent bouts of depression. Harris writes "I began to wonder if depression ran in my family. Did my mother and grandmother do what many other blacks with depression do - simply ignore it?" (Page 5, Hardback version). Why has depression, and mental health as a whole, been so overwhelmingly ignored by our community? Could the high incidences of alcoholism and substance abuse within our community be a result of ignored depression? Why are non-spiritual forms of therapy so taboo?

To answer the first part of the question I think that in the black community we ignore mental health and depression issues because we don't think these are "black" issues. In our communites there seems to be a stigma attached like depression is a white person's disease, like we're invincible and it shouldn't happen to us. Maybe it's because it indicates that we're weak and no one wants to be viewed as weak minded or weak--period. So we just tend to ignore it. I hope to come back with more but I'm at work right now and can't type everything that I want to say.