We Don’t Talk About Addiction in BIPOC Communities. Here’s How We Can Start That Conversation.
BIPOC patients who seek treatment for addiction, mental illness, and other behavioral health issues do so in spite of truly staggering challenges. There is a pervasive stigma around addiction and mental health affairs in communities of color, and the associated silencing or avoidance of discussions about mental wellness in our families and networks is devastating not only in terms of continuing that stigma, but actively dissuading people suffering from mental health issues and substance abuse from getting help or interfering with their ability to do so. We did not get here overnight, and the work that we have to do to address this crisis will similarly not be easy, but we owe it to ourselves and to our loved ones to boldly and bravely examine the pain of our communities and boldly reshape our relationships with one another.
There are a multitude of different factors that have gotten us to this crisis point, and they’ve compounded on one another until they became the difficult, complicated, shame-based mess of stigmatized, inaccessible mental health discussions that have become far too prevalent in BIPOC today. BIPOC are at a greatly heightened risk of being pulled into addiction or serious mental health issues because of trauma, ongoing state brutality, white supremacist violence, and structural socoecionomic disparities. We’ve also historically been actively manipulated into substance use or had our emotional health weaponized against us.
You can see examples of this, both large and small, throughout every corner of mainstream American society: from the ubiquitous racist stereotype of “an angry black woman” who is out of control and irrational just for expressing the most basic of feelings, to the ways Native people are similarly portrayed as “violent” or “dangerous” for mental healthcare struggles, to cases like undercover New York Police Department detectives approaching desperate, impoverished crack cocaine addicts in neighborhoods populated by BIPOC and arresting them, not the dealers, in sting operations. Institutions plagued by structural racism teach BIPOC from a young age that talking about their behavioral health will get them disbelieved, harassed, injured, detained, or murdered, like the 2020 case of a fifteen year old Black girl with ADHD named “Grace” in Ohio who was sent to juvenile hall for not doing her schoolwork or the fatal January shooting of Patrick Warren Sr., an unarmed Black man who was shot after his family requested a mental healthcare check. To many, it is very obviously not a coincidence that newfound compassion and restorative treatment for people struggling with heroin addiction was notably absent, when this addiction was primarily a BIPOC issue or during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, which predominantly affected Black communities.
Society has sent a clear message to BIPOC that we are unworthy of help and that we must hide or suppress our substance abuse issues or mental health struggles if we want to survive.
Not only is there stigma that is forced onto us from institutionalized racism and predominantly white communities, but there’s also our own internalized shame that has spread inside our own spaces. BIPOC women have frequently been cast as “crazy” or unstable for talking openly about their struggles, whereas BIPOC men have been conditioned to believe that they must be hyper-masculine and eskew any sense of emotional vulnerability.
The desire to be seen as strong and unbreakable is because we have been taught that this is how we must survive amidst the backdrop of systemic racism, and it has come at the cost of mental wellness in our communities. Native Americans have the highest rate of suicide across any racial group in the United States. Black Americans are 20% more likely to encounter a serious mental health issue than the general population, yet only 1 in 3 of Black people who need mental health treatment will actually receive it.
We cannot just immediately break down every barrier to treatment, every internalized shame-and-survival-based strategy, or every systemic desire to dehumanize BIPOC. That is work that our ancestors and neighbors and families have been doing for generations, and while we are closer than ever to realizing that dream, it remains a daunting task. But we can start somewhere, and that’s with our relationships with our mental health and the people around us.
We can pay attention to our behaviors and give ourselves permission to be honest and mindful, even in a protected and safe way. It is radically important that we create an internal sense of security, safety, and self-compassion that we have been denied for far too long. The cycles of shame have robbed us from our joy, our love, and our ability to heal, and BIPOC can start to break that cycle by honoring themselves and listening compassionately to their minds.
We can call out double standards and challenge the engrained internalized stigmas in our communities.
BIPOC patients looking for help can reach out to BIPOC mental health support groups and BIPOC-specific treatment resources. It is critical that we see people who look like us and share common challenges, trauma, and experiences getting the help that we need. It gives us permission to go down our own paths of healing when we are able to picture ourselves in that space.
BIPOC experience a startling amount of trauma, struggle, and shame. But we are not broken. In fact we are amazingly resilient. We deserve hope, healing, love, and a future where we no longer ignore our own pain. We can break the cycles of stigma that have cost has cost us far too much.