Mental Health Awareness Month: REST Centres’ Culturally-Sensitive Approach to Mental Wellness
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, where we as a community come together to empower the voice of mental health awareness and celebrate recovery from mental illness.
Black youth navigating housing insecurity often also navigate a myriad of other issues in the background, a leading one of which is their mental health. The mental health needs of the Black youth at REST Centres are vast, from neglect in the family to peer issues at school, bullying, depression, and generational trauma. One’s living environment echoes one’s mental state, and if one’s environment is toxic or abusive in childhood and early adolescence, those factors can manifest into mental illnesses such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Adverse Childhood Events Disorder, which are hard to overcome without stability and support.
Chrystal Harvey BScN MScN PhD (c), says that it is critical to address the needs of Black youth navigating housing insecurity, because, “if we can find safe environments for the youth, then inherently we can then provide client care that is safe, equitable, culturally-sensitive, and they can have their road to recovery which will have a positive outcome.”
REST Centres is committed to nurturing the mental health of our Black youth, and we advocate for their care and support in our daily work. However, we can’t impart lasting change in the conversations around mental health without understanding the history of our lives.
Mental Health in the Black community has historically been a complicated and taboo subject. According to Chrystal, through the lens of the Black diaspora via the Transatlantic slave trade, Black people who lived with mental illness were removed, tortured, and experimented on by their slave masters. Black families would ostracize and isolate these loved ones in order to protect them, and this narrative around mental health has evolved and persisted across generational boundaries.
It’s with this history and racial context that REST Centres grounds its culturally-sensitive approach to mental health. Registered Psychotherapist Charmaine Lane, who has given training to REST Staff on the subject, notes the importance of considering the possibility of racial trauma in every case at REST Centres. “Not all racialized youth are traumatized by racism, but a service provider should always acknowledge the intersectionality between race and everything else in a youth’s life and understand the differences in the difficulties experienced by a youth who is unhoused and Black versus a youth who is unhoused and White.”
Charmaine says that, as a Black-focused, BIPOC-serving organization, it’s important to avoid blanketing racial trauma under other mental health issues like anxiety, depression, withdrawal, low self-esteem and self-depreciation, and anger. In most cases, it’s not that these things don’t exist, but rather that they might not be the only things at play.
Thus, empowering the racial identities of our youth is key to fostering good, productive mental health and long-term recovery.
Tash Thompson, one of REST Centres’ Registered Social Workers, defines culturally-sensitive care as understanding the racial and social contexts present in the lens through which the youth experiences mental health. Service providers like REST must understand the mental health risk factors that are unique to the Black youth experience, such as bullying at school for their “nappy” hair, cultural dress, and dark skin, along with the racial and social context present in those comments and their impact. It’s endlessly important for the youth in our care to see themselves reflected in their providers.
Culturally-sensitive care for mental health is also passive and potent not just in what we say and what we do, but what we surround ourselves with in our daily lives. The Black youth we serve at REST often come from a fragmented sense of self, born from a lack of understanding of what belongs to them, culturally speaking, and that impacts their self-esteem. Tash says that it’s important to express Black culture in many ways: echoing our cultural beliefs and practices in the care space, sharing cultural foods, promoting the stories of others with similar experiences standing up in places of excellence, and sharing cultural regalia. “Sometimes it just has to be written on the wall,” Tash says.
REST Centres exists as a space for Black youth to openly discuss with each other about the experiences happening in their homes and lives, especially around mental health. Safe spaces should always exist for youth to express how they’re feeling and receive the help and guidance they need to navigate their emotions and mental health. If we can change the narrative in the Black community around mental health as something to be nurtured and not suppressed, then we can move mountains.