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

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

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