We Were Never Taught To Put It Down
Mental Health, Blackness, and the Weight We Were Never Given Permission to Release
By: Elvery Tinsley, LMHCA
Every May, Mental Health Awareness Month arrives and the internet fills up with the same content. Green ribbons. Self-care checklists. Reminders to drink water and go outside.
And every May, I find myself thinking: this is not the conversation Black people need.
Not because self-care doesn't matter. But because the version of mental health awareness that gets amplified every May was not built with us in mind. It doesn't account for what it costs to be Black in America. It doesn't name the specific weight we carry, in our bodies, our relationships, our communities or what happens when that weight goes unaddressed for a lifetime.
So this year I'm having a different conversation. One that I think is long overdue.
This is it.
The Silence We Inherited
Most of us grew up with some version of the same message.
You don't air your business. You don't let people see you struggle. You pray about it. You push through it. You handle it. And if you can't handle it , you definitely don't tell anybody outside this house.
I want to be clear about something before I say anything else: that message was not weakness. It was survival. There were seasons in our history where showing vulnerability was genuinely dangerous. Where being seen as broken had real consequences. Where the mask was not a limitation it was protection.
But here's what bell hooks understood and wrote about so powerfully in Salvation: Black People and Love, she said that while masking was sometimes crucial to survival, those strategies destroy our capacity to be truth tellers when we adopt them in contemporary life.
In other words: what kept us alive then is quietly killing us now.
The mask that was a shield has become a prison. And we are still wearing it. In our homes. In our relationships. In our own minds. When someone asks us how we're doing and we say fine before we've even checked.
That is the stigma. Not somebody else telling us not to talk. Us telling ourselves.
What the Stigma Actually Sounds Like
The mental health stigma in the Black community is not one thing. It sounds different depending on who you are.
For Black women — it sounds like a compliment. You're so strong. I don't know how you do it. You always hold it together. And we take it. We wear it. Because we were taught that our strength was our value. That being needed was the same as being loved. That if we fell apart, even for a minute , we would let everyone down.
bell hooks wrote about how Black women have been positioned as inexhaustible as if we were built to carry, built to endure, built to survive without anyone asking if we were okay. And what that does clinically is create a pattern where we perform wellness even when we are falling apart inside. Where we become the support system for everyone around us and have no support system of our own.
Strong Black Woman is not a compliment when it means you're not allowed to break.
For Black men — it sounds like: Man up. That's soft. Figure it out. We don't talk about that. bell hooks wrote in Salvation that for Black men of all ages, it is more acceptable to express rage than to give voice to emotional needs. So what happens when you were raised in a world that told you the only emotion available to you was anger? You get very good at anger. And everything else, the grief, the fear, the love, the loneliness, either comes out sideways or it doesn't come out at all.
For Black couples — the stigma becomes relational. When you take a Black woman who was taught not to show weakness and a Black man who was taught not to show emotional need and you put them in a relationship together… you get two people who love each other deeply, who are both in pain, and who have no idea how to say that to each other. So instead they fight. Or they go silent. Or they perform fine so convincingly that neither one of them feels known.
The silence doesn't just live in individuals. It lives in our relationships. And it is costing us our intimacy, our connection, and sometimes our marriages.
Where the Stigma Came From
Understanding the roots of something is not the same as excusing it. But I believe deeply that when we understand where a pattern comes from, we stop blaming ourselves for it and that creates the first opening for change.
Three things shaped the mental health stigma in our community.
First — survival. Our ancestors had to mask their emotions because showing vulnerability was genuinely dangerous. The mask was not passed down as a burden it was passed down as a gift. As protection. But it got handed from generation to generation until we forgot we were wearing it.
Second — religion. Faith is real in our community. It has sustained us through things that should have broken us. But "just pray about it" was often the only mental health resource our communities had. And while prayer provides real comfort, it was never meant to be the only tool. When it becomes a way to avoid addressing real psychological pain it becomes part of the problem, not the solution.
Third — a justified distrust of medical systems. Our distrust of mental health institutions is not irrational. It is historically informed. Tuskegee. The long history of Black people being used as medical experiments without consent. The documented dismissal of Black pain by healthcare providers. The ways the DSM the manual therapists use to diagnose was used at various points in history to pathologize Blackness itself.
Our community learned that the system was not safe. And that lesson was correct. It was earned.
What I am asking, as a Black clinician who is committed to creating sacred spaces, is whether that historical lesson is still serving you today. Whether the distrust that once protected you is now keeping you from help you genuinely need.
You can hold both things. Distrust the system AND still get the help. They are not mutually exclusive.
What Being Black Right Now Is Doing to Our Bodies
I want to shift from history to the present. Because what we are carrying right now even in 2026 is not abstract. It is specific. And it is heavy.
Dr. Arline Geronimus, a public health professor at the University of Michigan, proposed something called the weathering hypothesis. She found that the chronic stress of racism, the discrimination, the marginalization, the hypervigilance, the daily navigation of a system that was not built for you deteriorates the body at a cellular level. It wears down the heart, the nervous system, the endocrine system, the arteries.
She described it this way, much like an unprotected house being battered by relentless rainstorms, systemic injustice erodes the body over time.
And here is what makes this finding so important, Dr. Geronimus found that weathering happens regardless of income, education, or access to resources. College-educated, professionally employed Black Americans still experience accelerated biological aging. Because the stressor is not poverty alone. The stressor is racism. The stressor is being Black in America.
Dr. William Smith at the University of Utah adds another layer with his concept of racial battle fatigue which he defines as the cumulative result of a natural race-related stress response to distressing mental and emotional conditions that emerge from constantly facing racially dismissive, demeaning, and hostile environments.
Dr. Smith says racism is coded in the body as violence. Your nervous system does not distinguish between a physical threat and a racial one. When you are followed in a store, when you are the only Black person in the room and you feel it, when you watch another Black person be killed on video, your body responds the same way it would respond to physical danger.
Fight. Flight. Freeze.
The physical symptoms of racial battle fatigue are documented… high blood pressure, chronic headaches, insomnia, muscle tension, digestive issues, exhaustion. And the psychological symptoms, anxiety, frustration, anger, hopelessness, hypervigilance, depression are equally real.
You are not sensitive. You are injured.
The Cost of Staying Silent
The weight doesn't disappear because we don't talk about it. It just finds somewhere else to live.
In our bodies as chronic stress, as inflammation, as the physical conditions that disproportionately affect Black Americans. High blood pressure. Autoimmune conditions. Sleep disorders. Our bodies are keeping score of everything we have been told to push through.
In our relationships as distance, as unspoken resentment, as the slow erosion of intimacy between two people who love each other but have never learned to be honest with each other. Depression that looks like anger. Anxiety that looks like control. Trauma that looks like distance. We have gotten very good at making our symptoms look like personality traits.
In our community as the pain that comes out sideways. The gender war. The violence. The ways we sometimes turn on each other because we have nowhere safe to turn inward.
And most importantly in our children. What we don't heal in ourselves, we pass on. The silence is not protecting anyone. It is shaping what the next generation learns about what it means to struggle, what it means to need help, and what it means to be human.
What Putting It Down Actually Looks Like
I want to offer you something practical before I close. Because I do not believe in naming a problem without pointing toward a way through it.
Name it before you try to fix it. There is neuroscience behind this. Dr. Dan Siegel at UCLA calls it "name it to tame it" — when you put language to an emotion, you activate the prefrontal cortex and reduce activity in the amygdala, your threat detection center. In other words, naming what you're feeling literally calms your nervous system. Start with one honest sentence. Not to everyone but to yourself. "I am not okay right now." That sentence is not weakness. It is the beginning of everything.
Try the physiological sigh. Research by Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford shows this is the fastest science-backed way to reduce acute stress. Double inhale through your nose: first breath in, then a second quick sniff on top , then one long slow exhale through your mouth. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system and signals to your body that the threat is over. You can do this anywhere. It takes ten seconds.
Move your body to complete the stress cycle. Drs. Emily and Amelia Nagoski, in their book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, explain that stress is a biological cycle requiring completion. Physical movement even a 20-minute walk signals to your nervous system that you survived. That the stress is done. Whatever is stressing you, after you deal with it, move your body.
Find community. Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University found that social isolation increases mortality risk by 26%, the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Our ancestors healed in community. We have individualized healing to the point where we think we're supposed to do it alone. We were never supposed to do it alone. You need at least one space where you don't have to perform. Where you can be in process. Where you are known, not just followed.
An Invitation
Mental Health Awareness Month, to me, is not about green ribbons. It is about telling the truth. About what being Black in America costs. About what it costs our bodies, our relationships, our children, and our communities when we stay silent.
You deserve more than survival. You deserve to actually feel okay. Not performing okay, actually okay.
This month I am hosting four free Monday lives, going deep on each section of this conversation every week.
And on May 28th I am hosting We Got You, Sis, a 2-hour virtual Sisterhood Circle on Zoom for Black women who are ready to stop carrying the weight alone.
This is the room where we put some of it down. Together.
Join us May 28th · 6–8pm · Zoom
Join Harmony Collective this month for $34.50 (reg. $69/mo) and the event is included. Offer ends May 31st.
And if you're not ready for the event, start with the free Burnout Checklist.
It will show you exactly where you are right now.
References
Geronimus, A.T. (1992). The weathering hypothesis and the health of African-American women and infants. Ethnicity & Disease.
Geronimus, A.T., Hicken, M., Keene, D., & Bound, J. (2006). "Weathering" and age patterns of allostatic load scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States. American Journal of Public Health.
Geronimus, A.T. (2023). Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. Little, Brown Spark.
Smith, W.A. (2003). Racial battle fatigue and the miseducation of Black men. The Urban Review.
Smith, W.A. (2024). Racial battle fatigue as a systemic racism-related repetitive stress injury. University of Utah.
Siegel, D.J. (2010). Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Bantam Books.
Huberman, A. (2023). Physiological sigh research. Stanford University School of Medicine.
Nagoski, E. & Nagoski, A. (2019). Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Ballantine Books.
Holt-Lunstad, J. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality. Perspectives on Psychological Science.
hooks, b. (2001). Salvation: Black People and Love. William Morrow.
Elvery is a licensed therapist associate and the founder of Harmony Counseling Network and Harmony Collective — a community for Black women and couples doing the inner work of becoming.
Follow her on Instagram and Facebook @therapywithelvery.
