Mental Health Stigma in the Black Community

The stigma of mental health seeking has been an issue in the Black community for decades. Historically, Black people have been and continue to be discriminated by the health care system. Black people have received inadequate treatment, misdiagnoses, been victims of inhumane studies, and involuntary sterilization. These experiences have caused the Black community to distrust health care professionals and prevented African Americans to seek professional help.

Masuda, Anderson, and Edmonds (2012) examined whether mental health stigma and self-concealment were associated with attitudes African American college students have towards seeking professional help. The results of this study concluded that mental health stigma and self-concealment were

negatively associated with help-seeking attitudes. This study also revealed a positive association between mental health stigma and self- concealment. The researchers of this study looked at age, gender, and previous experiences of seeking professional help in their participants. 78% of the participants were female, and the participants that were older had more favorable help-seeking attitudes towards seeking mental health help. African American college students have the tendency to self-conceal personal information they perceive to be negative or embarrassing, this encourages students to not seek professional help when needed. This study relates to the study conducted by Wallace and Constantine (2005), which examined the relationship among Afrocentric cultural values, favorable psychological help-seeking attitudes, perceived counseling stigma, and self-concealment in African American college students. This study found that African American women had more positive help-seeking attitudes than African American men. The participants with higher levels of Afrocentrism and cultural values had a higher perceived stigma about counseling and self-concealment. Wallace and Constantine (2005) stated that African American college students who have higher levels of Afrocentrism may have higher levels of self-concealment because of the stigma associated with counseling services and students may fear that if they reveal negative information, counselors may stereotype their larger cultural group and may make them feel oppressed in some ways.
Cheng, Kwan, and Sevig (2013) examined the stigma associated with seeking psychological help in African American, Latino American, and Asian American college students. They conducted the study to figure out whether certain psychocultural variables predicted stigma associated with seeking psychological help in racially-ethnic minority students. They found that the correlation between ethnic identity to self-stigma wasn’t equivalent across ethnic groups. This study differs from other studies because it measures self-stigma of seeking help, not the public stigma of mental health help seeking. Cheng, Kwan, and Sevig (2013) refers to self-stigma as one’s own negative perceptions of himself or herself for seeking help. Results of the study concluded that African American college students with higher ethnic identity predicted lower self-stigma associated with seeking psychological help. Having a sense of identity and relationship to one’s culture lessens the negative stigmatization of one’s self regarding seeking help for mental health. This study also found that students that were more open to other cultures had lower self-stigma than their peers. The more they could connect with others from different backgrounds, the less negative they were towards themselves for seeking professional help.
Coleman, Chapman, and Wang examined how a color-blind racial ideology could affect African American college students in relation to race-related stress.

Color-blind racial ideology is the idea that race isn’t important, therefore should not and does not matter in terms of identity. The results of the study found that students that had color-blind attitudes had less race-related stress than their peers. The researchers noted that because this was a self-reporting survey, the data is limiting because students may not be aware of the systemic and institutional forms of racism that covertly affects them. In this study, 79.4% of the participants were women, which is a common factor among articles regarding the mental health of college students. Due to some students identifying themselves as ethnicities such as Caribbean or African, the sample only used the data from the students that identified as African American because they did not want to have any differences within the participant’s identities. Sanchez ad Awad (2016) study proved that there wasn’t a significant difference between ethnic groups in relation to discrimination. Sanchez and Awad (2016) conducted a study that examined ethnic group differences in racial attitudes, perceived racial discrimination, and mental health outcomes in African American, Black Caribbean, and Latino Caribbean college students. These students share the same racial identity in the United States (Black) but ethnic backgrounds are vastly

different. The findings of the study showed that there are no significant ethnic group differences between racial identity and perceived discrimination. More than half of the participants were born in the USA, Caribbean and Latino Americans experiences with racial discrimination is the same as African Americans because they share the same racial identity. Sanchez and Awad (2016) hypothesized that immersion-emersion and dissonance attitudes would correlate with increased perceived racial discrimination across the ethnic groups, the study supports this hypothesis and found that these racial identity attitudes correlated with increased depression. The participants in this study were predominately female, this limits the research in this study but supports the study of the stigma associated with seeking mental health help among African American women college students.
Barksdale and Molock (2008) examined whether subjective norms learned from family and peers influenced the mental health help-seeking behaviors of African American college students from a private and a public university. The participants were primarily female and every student identified as African American/ Black. Results found that perceived family norms were a stronger predictor of help-seeking behavior than peer norms for the female participants. Family has a profound influence in relation to how African American students perceive mental health. Peers also have an influence on how African American college students perceive mental health help-seeking, but family had the biggest influence. This article suggests that it is different factors that influence African American males and females to seek professional help from mental health providers.
Depression and anxiety due to race to related stress are some of the psychological symptoms students may suffer from (Bowen-Reid and Harrell, 2002). Stansbury, Wimsatt, Simpson, Martin, and Nelson (2001) conducted a study to examine mental health literacy regarding depression in a sample of African American college students. All the participants identified as female. The results of this study found that over half of the participants are aware of depressive symptoms and they believe that people can recover from depression with help from mental health professionals. The participants also noted that family and friends are a positive source for support with mental health challenges.
Blackmon, Coyle, Davenport, Owens, and Sparrow (2016) conducted a study to determine if childhood racial-ethnic socialization experiences predicted race-specific coping among African American college students attending a Historically Black university. Specifically, this study examined Africultural coping, which is culture specific coping methods, and john-henryism, which is a coping mechanism that emerges out of oppressive social conditions (Blackmon, Coyle, Davenport, Owens, and Sparrow, 2016). John-henryism and africultural coping methods are often used in place of mental health professionals. 86% of the participants in this study identified as female, and majority grew up in predominately African American communities. This study found that cross-racial relationships were positively associated with spiritual- centered and collective coping. The researchers also found that students that were closer linked to their African American heritage as a child coped more with spirit-centered, collective, and ritual-centered coping mechanisms in college.
Banerjee, Rowley, and Johnson examined the connection between community violence exposure and racial socialization and the psychological well-being of African American college students at university in the Midwest.

As with majority of the studies, the participants were mostly female (76%). The researchers hypothesized that exposure to community violence would be negatively related to mental health outcomes, racial socialization would be positively related to mental health, and racial socialization would alleviate the effects community violence have on mental health. The results of this study found that victimization from community violence was related to depressive symptoms in students and students with lower levels of racial socialization had higher levels of victimization and aggressive behaviors. Students with higher levels of cultural socialization has better mental health outcomes. These findings are similar to the findings of Blackmon, Coyle, Davenport, Owens, and Sparrow, which indicates that students that are exposed to cultural socialization, have better psychological outcomes. With this data, colleges can create culturally specific mental health programs and initiatives that can better serve the growing African American population on

campuses.
Jones, Cross, and DeFour (2007) examined which racial identity attitudes moderate the relationship between racist stress events and racist stress appraisals and mental health outcomes of Black women students. The participants identified as either African American or Caribbean. Jones, Cross, and DeFour (2007) noted that racist stress events were positively associated with depression. Previous research proves that Black/African Americans cope with mental health differently, so it’s imperative that colleges provide this population with culturally relevant services that can adequately serve this population. Throughout the literature, it was noted that most, if not all the participants identified as female. Not only do men and women approach research about mental health at different rates, research proves that Black men and women cope differently; having gender specific programs would also benefit this population. Having mental health professionals that racially or ethnically identify with the Black population would alleviate the stigmas associated with help-seeking, since African Americans are more likely to seek help from providers that look like them. There is so many ethnic differences within the Black race, it’s important to not group them as one specific population. Future research should investigate the institutional characteristics of predominately white institutions and how they conceptualize psychological and mental health help regarding Black/ African American students. ;