She is the one who holds it. The household, the church kitchen, the aging.
In conversations about mental health for Black Women, it often becomes clear how much
is carried on her shoulders.
Parent, the grown son still finding his feet, the job that watches her twice as
close for half the grace. She pays the light bill nobody else remembered. She
answers the phone at two in the morning. She is competent past the point of
exhaustion, and the reward for her competence is more weight.
The world has a name for her. The strong Black woman. It sounds like
praise. It works like a sentence. Strong is what you call a woman when you
need her to keep carrying and you would rather not ask how she is doing it.
I cannot tell you what it is to be a Black woman in America. That is not my
lane, and I will not pretend it is. What I can tell you is what I watched it cost
the women who raised me and stood beside me. My mother put a book in
my hands and a spine in my back, and she ran on fumes doing it, and I do
not remember anyone asking her how she was holding up. This post is for
her, and for every woman running the same arithmetic tonight: everyone fed
but me, everyone steady but me.
What follows are places run by Black women, for Black women, where
setting the load down is the start of something and not a sign you failed.
Therapy for Black Girls, a therapist who already gets it
Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist, started Therapy for Black
Girls because Black women kept asking her the same thing: where do I find
someone who looks like me and will not make me explain myself before we
start. In 2019 she answered with a directory.
Search it by location and by what you are dealing with, and you find Black
women therapists near you, the ones who already understand the church,
the hair, the mother-work, the anger you are not allowed to show at the
office. There is a weekly podcast where she talks through anxiety,
boundaries, and grief in plain language, and a community she calls the
Thrive Tribe where women trade what actually works.
If a therapist still feels like a bridge too far, start with the podcast on the
drive home. Then open the directory and read two or three profiles. You do
not have to book the first name. A bad fit tells you something; it does not
close the door.
The Loveland Foundation, when the wall is money
A lot of women already know they need to talk to someone. The wall is the
invoice. The Loveland Foundation tears it down.
Rachel Cargle started it in 2018 from a birthday fundraiser that pulled in
more than a quarter of a million dollars, all of it aimed at therapy for Black
women and girls. Since then the fund has paid for more than 210,000 hours
of it. You apply through their site, and once you are approved they cover
four to twelve sessions, enough time to settle in with a therapist, learn a few
tools, and feel the ground start to firm up under you. They work through
networks you may already know, Therapy for Black Girls and Open Path and
Talkspace among them, so the money meets you where care already exists.
If cost is the only thing standing between you and the first appointment, this
is the application to fill out. Do it for yourself the way you would do it for
your daughter without a second thought.
Sista Afya Community Care, healing that costs what you can pay
Sista Afya Community Care grew out of a plain observation: Black women in
Chicago were being priced out of care that was supposed to be for them. So
they built care that does not depend on a co-pay.
On the South Side, Sista Afya offers therapy, case management, and free
workshops where Black women gather to learn and to hold one another up,
with payment set by what you actually earn. Insurance, Medicaid, a sliding
scale, or no cost at all. Black women lead it, and the model is the point: keep
the price low, keep the community close.
If you live near Chicago, this is a door worth walking through. If you do not,
take the blueprint to your own city and ask the clinics and the faith houses
near you why a version of it does not exist yet, then help build one.
Black Women’s Health
Imperative, the whole woman and the longer fight
Your mind does not sit in a separate room from the rest of you. The Black
Women’s Health Imperative, the first nonprofit created by Black women to
advance the health of Black women and girls, treats it that way, putting
mental health inside the full picture of a woman’s body and life and the
policy that shapes both.
This is the one to know when the fight moves past your own kitchen table.
Their work reaches into research and into the rooms where decisions about
Black women’s health get made, the places where access stops being a
personal struggle and becomes a budget line. Bring their material to a
sorority chapter, a women’s ministry, a community board, when you are
ready to push on the system and not only survive it.
988, for the night it gets bad
Some nights the long grind turns into a cliff. When that happens, the 988
Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is a call or a text, free, around the clock. You do
not have to be sure you are in crisis to use it. You have to be hurting and
willing to say so to one person.
For the woman who has never once let herself fall apart, this is the hardest
sentence in the post and the most important: you are allowed to be the one
who needs help tonight. Put the number in your phone. Tell your sister, your
daughter, your prayer partner that calling it is not weakness. It is the same
strength you have spent on everyone else, finally turned around to face you.
A word to the men who love her
I have to say this part plainly, because I lived the other side of it. For years I
handed the women around me feelings I would not face myself, and let them
carry the weather in the house while I called my silence strength. That is a
way of using a woman up, and a lot of us do it without ever raising our
voices.
So if you love a Black woman, stop outsourcing your healing to her. Carry
your own. Ask her how she is and then be still long enough to hear the real
answer. Take something off her list this week without being asked, and do
not announce it. The fastest way to protect her mental health is to stop being
one more thing that costs her.
What you can do this week
Pick one. If money is the wall, apply to the Loveland Foundation. If you
want to start smaller, pull up Therapy for Black Girls tonight and let the
podcast ride on your commute. If you are near Chicago, look up Sista Afya; if
you are not, find the community clinic closest to you and ask what it offers
Black women. Save 988 in your phone before you close this page. And if you
are the man in her life, do the one thing above that does not require her to
ask.
A woman who has carried everyone does not set it down all at once. She sets
it down the way she picked it up, one piece at a time, usually with people
finally reaching to take a corner of it from her. You asking for help is not the
strong Black woman breaking. It is her deciding, at last, to be one of the
people she takes care of. Mama, that includes you.
If you want the fuller picture behind these resources, I gathered the healing tools and the work of breaking the stigma in one place in the broader Black mental health guide.
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