Mental health experts assumed that people of all races had the same risk factors for self-harm -- emerging evidence suggests that is not the case. He was tired of the violence in his Boston neighborhood, where his older brother had spent more than a year recovering from a gunshot wound to his leg. And he was especially tired of the comments about his weight.
Over the past generation, a mental health crisis has been brewing among Black youths like Joe, one that very few people — including Black families — have spoken about publicly. Self-reported suicide attempts rose nearly 80% among Black adolescents from 1991 to 2019, while the prevalence of attempts did not change significantly among those of other races and ethnicities.
Suicide and mental illness are often thought of as a “white phenomenon,” said Michael A. Lindsey, the executive director of the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at New York University, who studies the mental health of Black adolescents. Among teenagers and young adults, suicide rates remain highest among whites, Native Americans and Alaska Natives. But while the suicide rate has recently declined among those groups, it has continued to rise among Black youths. From 2013 to 2019 the suicide rate of Black boys and men ages 15 to 24 rose by 47%, and by 59% for Black girls and women of the same age.
“You have to bring culture into this, you have to talk about racism, you have to talk about discrimination,” said Arielle Sheftall, a principal investigator at the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “It is something that Black youth experience every single day.”
“When I told Mom how I was feeling, she didn’t seem to care,” Denise said, adding: “She said I had nothing to stress about because I’m a kid.”One evening in September, after a disagreement with her mother, she texted one of her school counselors and told her: “I don’t want to be here no more.”“The first three nights I spent in the hospital, all I could do is cry,” said Denise, who received her first prescription for psychiatric medication while she was there.
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