November 15, 2022 • 48 mins
Michelle and Dr. Rheeda are getting real about mental health and suicide in the black community. Dr. Rheeda shares how her observation of a lack of resources and research in psychology was undeserving the black community. She also goes into the statics of suicide within the black community and what we can do to help turn things around for ourselves. CHECK IN to this episode to know that you are not alone and things do get better! The Checking In team is sending you love…always.
Suicide & Crisis Lifeline Contact Info:
Dial 988
https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
Find a Therapist:
https://borislhensonfoundation.org/
https://therapyforblackgirls.com/
For more about Dr. Rheeda Walker, visit: https://www.rheedawalkerphd.com/
Follow Dr. Rheeda on social media!
Instagram: @dr.rheedawalker
Twitter: @rheedawalkerphd
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Twitter: @RealMichelleW
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Checking In with Michelle Williams, a production of
My Heart Radio and The Black Effect. Hey, friend, it's Michelle,
(00:20):
just checking in. I'm excited about this episode, but I
want to tell you that it's a possibility that for you,
this episode could be a little heavy because we will
discuss some heavy topics. So prayerfully you listen with an
open heart, you listen with an open mind. And if
(00:42):
this episode is not for you, maybe it's for a
loved one, Maybe it's for a friend or a colleague.
So this episode is going to be very bold in
the topic of mental health and in the topic of suicide.
And I just want to let you know there is
help for you. You You are certainly not alone, and there
(01:05):
are hotlines to call if you are feeling suicidal having
those thoughts. That hotline is nine eight eight. Your girl
has been there. So this is a judgment free zone.
I do want you to know that you can make it,
and that you will make it should you decide to
(01:29):
just hold on another day, I promise you it gets better.
My next guest has some helpful information for you coming
up next. Hey, y'all, welcome to another amazing week of
(01:52):
checking in and Like I said, the three pillars of
checking in is checking in with yourself, checking in with others,
and checking in with God. Our next guest is someone
that I had the pleasure of actually meeting in person twice.
I met her at Charlemagne, the God's Mental Wealth Summit
by I Heart in New York, and then the both
of us we were on Charlemagne Show together and it
(02:14):
was an absolute delight. We had sister girl conversation. She
is amazing a speaker, author, psychologist, and researcher. You've seen
her in many major publications and shows including Red Table Talk,
Ebony b Et. Please welcome the award winning professor again
psychologist Dr Rita Walker. Hi, Michelle, is so good to
(02:38):
be here with you. It is so good to be
here with you as well. How are you? I am
good as far as I know. That's my standard response really,
as far as you know. Could something creep up on
you and you could be like, I'm not okay something
good things happen all the time, right, But based on
what I know, I'm good. I'm good. I know that's right.
(02:59):
I guess we are only responsible for what we know.
So for everybody out there, prayerfully you have the same response,
as far as you know, all is will it? And
I have the same response as far as I know,
and as far as I can look around, it's nothing
but moving boxes because I'm moving. But as far as
I know, I'm okay, that's wonderful, and you're right. We're
only responsible for what we know. Yes, and I probably
(03:20):
look like I've been moving, but I'm not moving for
another few days. Doctor read it. And I have some
help assigned to come and help me pack. But the
way my anxiety is set up, and it's anxiety which
is a little bit of excitement. I started packing myself.
I went to the home depot and got boxes. Anyway,
I was like, I can't why I'm excited. Is that
(03:46):
anxiety or excitement? You know it? Since you said it
was excitement, then we're gonna take your word for it.
I don't know most people who are excited about moving.
But you have to move in the spirit and self conspiracy.
You gotta get you some boxes and move on. To
listen to that voice, we have to anticipating this move
(04:07):
out into something awesome that I am excited about where
I've been living. Guy, I got this spot at the
end of twenty nineteen, and then we were locked down.
And I will say that this place has been a
place of healing and restoration, and the way that I
set my environment up was for healing and restoration. Will
(04:31):
always be healing, will always be needing restoration, but I
need a bigger spot to healing restore. You'll just have
to honor the new space because what you did in
that space obviously worked for that space. And even though
it's a bigger space, you can't just assume you'll bring
what you had in the old space to space. You
(04:51):
gotta move in that space for what it is. Right.
That's so good because how many of us think, well,
if I just moved to another state, if I just
move into a bigger home, a bigger kind, or a
bigger apartment, everything's gonna be okay. But you take that
same dysfunction to the new place, and you have to
make adjustments. And I think we get stuck sometimes, you know,
(05:13):
like it's it's easy to get stuck because it's comfortable.
It's like, well, it's what I know. But we have
to be open to new possibilities, right, And so I understand,
But at the same time, I have to work on,
you know, just being mindful of where I am and
what I'm bringing two different spaces, but still recognizing, you know,
(05:33):
the importance of authenticity. At the same time, we have
to give ourselves room to grow and be bigger. Absolutely,
absolutely authenticity. But even in being authenticity, there are still
room to refine those rough edges. Because I said it before,
I've said it in a podcast or two, where people
say I am authentic, this is just me, and you
gotta deal with it. Maybe it makes a person not
(05:56):
want to work on a few things, especially if you
confront them about something and they say, this is just me.
I'm being authentically me. But I don't know if that's
the truth all the time. I don't know either. I
think a lot of times we are afraid to move
and do things differently because we don't know what the
consequence is going to be. I mean, it really is
(06:18):
easy to to be complacent, to be honest, and to
say yes, that's who I am and that's who uncomfortable being,
and they know how people react to them. But there
are so many of us who know that we could
do something different, we could be something different, and we
need to experiment with that. Sometimes I can talk a
lot about experiments, but we're afraid of how things you
know will will shift. But it's understandable because it's the unknown.
(06:42):
The unknown scares a lot of us. That is so true.
The unknown scares the majority of us. There's very few
people that I know that are just excited about going
into the unknown blind. Even though you have faith, it's
still scary. Like you said, to go into the unknown
confronts some emotional wounds, some trauma, or just be in
(07:05):
a different place that you've never been before, a new city,
a new job. It is a bit scary. Amazing, Well,
we're gonna pivot. You have been up to some powerful
work these past two decades, specifically on advancing the emotional
health of African Americans, and you state something so profound.
(07:26):
Black people do things differently, see things differently, feel things differently. Now,
the question is, as you were pursuing psychology, did you
always know that you were going to create a different
approach to that field when it came to black people.
I didn't. I can't say that I honestly knew. Even
(07:47):
now as people reach out to me and say, oh
my goodness, the book changed my life. It's just I
couldn't have imagined it. I really couldn't have. And when
I decided to pursue the PhD uh in clinical psychology,
I thought that I would maybe do some things for
my community, you know, maybe my neighborhood, maybe my family,
because I really just didn't think that the way that
(08:10):
depression is an example exists for us is the same
as was what was in my undergraduate psychology textbook at
University of Georgia. I just I didn't see it that way.
And if I couldn't see it that way in the
text book, and that meant that we couldn't get help,
there weren't solutions. And so I was thinking, Okay, well
I'll go ahead and get this PhD. My mom always
(08:31):
said you gotta be a lawyer or a doctor. So
I said, okay, I guess we'll we'll you'll get the doctor.
That was my thinking was, I'll get that PhD, and
I'll have a better understanding of our mental health in
context and what it means, so that maybe I could
help some folks and get better insight. Definitely, to go
back to your mom, did she see something in you
that said you can be a lawyer or a doctor, Honestly,
(08:53):
I think it was some of a tradition of what
I've actually heard from other first generation So I'm a
first generation Asian college student. My parents didn't go to college.
But you know, you want to have an honorable, a
noble trade or job or position, and in her mind
that meant going to law school or going to medical school.
And and I accepted that. I was like, Okay, you're
(09:15):
gonna do it right. And I thought I was gonna
go to law school because I actually like to talk
to people. So I thought, Okay, sure, I'll be a lawyer.
And it wasn't until I was an undergrad at Georgia
I had an opportunity to shadow attorneys, and in shadowing them,
I thought it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel
like me, and so I had to go back to
the drawing board. Because most of my life I thought
(09:37):
I was gonna be an attorney. And when I went
back to the drawing board, it was the psychology textbooks
that spoke to me the most, and that's why I
decided to do psychology. You answered no, that you didn't
always know that you would create an approach in the
field of clinical psychology as it relates to black people,
So there was it a particular moment then, because again
(09:59):
the thing that you said something profound is we do
things differently. Black people do things differently. We see and
we feel did something happen that made you have that epiphany?
It's one of those things I think that's always been
with me. And I want to say that, you know,
maybe there was a time in in elementary school, and
maybe there was And I think about how in fact,
(10:19):
in elementary school and by the way, so I grew
up in predominantly black neighborhood church. My schools they vary
depending on where I was. Did you go up in Georgia,
Georgia Native through and through? And I think that I
recognize that even though I love school, I just felt
like I was different. I saw things differently at times.
(10:40):
And I didn't attribute that to me being black or
African American. To be honest, I think I do now
you know different, I have a different perspective. But I
think growing up it was just like, Okay, I kind
of see things a little bit differently, and I didn't
have the language to be able to put culture or
to put African ancestry or history to any of that
(11:02):
it just it's what it was who I was. And
I think that's why I say, like, I don't know
if there was a moment, like I've always just been like,
do what makes sense be you and do what makes
sense to you. Yes, yes, Now, when you said you
went to COOL for clinical psychology, did you do the
track to be a therapist or just research? And because
(11:22):
there are there a few tracks to psychology, if I'm
not mistaken, Yeah, that's a good question. So I earned
my PhD at a research intensive institution, and what that
means is I had the capacity to do research or
well trained and do a research but then I also
had the capacity to see therapy clients, to see patients,
and so I had to see patients. Not to get
(11:43):
licensed license was optional, but I had to see patients
in order to earn the PhD. So I was well
trained to do both. Most people really choose one track
of the other. And one of the reasons that I
decided to take an academic position was because I could
do research. I could answer research questions that mattered to
our community. But then I could also train doctoral students
(12:06):
so that they could be able to provide culturally meaningful care.
To patients independently, so I get to do all the things. Okay,
all right, thank you for answering that. I asked that
because of my acceptance into a school for a psychology
and I just remember there was something where you could
click if you wanted to actually be a therapist or
(12:29):
something else. So yeah, So your book called The Unapologetic
Guide to Black Mental Health. It addresses the lack of
understanding and research in this field for African Americans. I
did a keynote speech for a bioscience organization in Washington,
d C. And there were four of four black people
(12:50):
in the room. Everybody of all other nationalities, even religions
by the way, but only four of us. But the
majority looked like if saw the middle of the street,
they would pass as Caucasian. And one brother got up
and asked the question, what can we do? And I
just hate that, first of all, bring more of us
(13:12):
in the room. There are more black doctors and scientists
PhDs such as yourself. To me, what can we do?
Bring more in the room? Right? It's kind of disappointed
or kind of hurt for US African Americans black people,
and you got a room basically full of white people.
(13:32):
Trying to figure out how to do stuff for us
in the field of mental health. Its mind boggling. See, like,
that's why I do what I do. I mean, it's
sad and it's also not surprising, and it's in part
why I had to write the book, because the same
(13:53):
narratives play out over and over again. You know, we
don't have enough providers. We don't have an of research.
We don't have enough people who understand the nuances of
what it means to exist as a black person in
this society. We don't have enough. Meanwhile, the gatekeepers, who
are the folks who say you get to have a PhD.
And you get to have a PhD and you don't
(14:15):
haven't expanded their worldview on what it means to be
someone who can achieve and be successful and have a
different perspective in this discipline. Uh. And so I talked
to to you know, aspiring graduate students all the time
who could make a contribution. But then I think about
(14:36):
when they get into that classroom, and there are microaggressions
that happened in the classroom, and I know it for
a fact a few decades and I know that they're
still happening. You know, what is it that's happening in
the system that says this is okay one and two
that keeps out the people who can help to change
the system. It's a reality that I don't see chain honestly,
(15:01):
for the foreseeable future until something radical shifts. Now, if
you were the person on the podium, what would you
have said to the young brother who asked that question? Oh,
my goodness, Well, I would have thanked him for the
question to buy myself at the time, recognizing, you know
that it's a it's a tough system to crack. And
(15:21):
then I would say to him to reach out to
the people. And I call them the gatekeepers, so university
professors who he might be interested in working with, you know,
and asking them, you know, what are they looking for
in an applicant. Now, granted, there aren't a lot of
gatekeepers who are open, but there are some. And actually
I did a video on YouTube, one of the ones
(15:42):
that's been watched the most. It talks about how to
get into a doctoral program in clinical psychology because we
don't always know kind of the I won't call it secrets,
but you know, the unspoken language of how to get
into these programs so I think we have to get
folks to be more informed about what they need to do.
You know, you need to have research experience before you
(16:03):
get into a research program. Like that makes no sense, right,
but that is the reality. And I have students that
apply to work with me who don't have research experience,
and so it's not a good fit. And I'm not
gonna set up a student who thinks that they're gonna
go in they're just gonna get good grades and they're
going to be successful, because it takes a lot more
than that. So folks have to be much more informed
(16:24):
about what it takes to get into these programs. We
also need folks who are funding students who are from
different backgrounds. I did my PhD at Florida State University,
where they had a funding program to recruit twenty five
students in the entire state across all disciplines to be
able to earn a PhD. I'm pretty confident that if
(16:47):
the universities didn't have access to that free money, they
would not have admitted the students that they admitted, and
there's only twenty five of us in the entire state.
They would not have admitted the students that they did.
But I was just that Florida State last week and
there were three doctoral students in the clinical site program,
three total. Yeah, I'm sitting upair eyes are big, like
(17:10):
whoa wow. It is very much a pipeline issue. M H.
I think to me to what's been going on in
the country lately create so many stressors, stressors in life
for African Americans black people. Wait, are we supposed to
(17:33):
say African Americans and black people? Because that it's just
I say both because I recognize that not everyone who
identifies as black identifies as African Americans, you know. So
we have our Nigerian family and Jamaican American and Haitian,
and those folks may say that they're black, but they
don't identify as African American. So I use both. But
(17:55):
I used black to be inclusive, got it? And y'all
y'all that are listening, y'all. No, she didn't ask that question, y'all.
I read too much and I've seen where some people
say you shouldn't call us African Americans, you should call
us black, and you know, so, I'm listen, y'all. This
is me, like Dr Rita said in being Inclusive, But
(18:17):
I'm gonna say this, once you've come to America period,
whether you are born in Africa, when you come to America,
you will be viewed as black. So I'm gonna ask
this question and say that the stressors in life for
black people can be very different, especially due to racism,
(18:39):
and there is an emotional toll because of this. Due
to this, What are signed and also what is something
practical we can do today to help help each other
to help each other? Well, I don't share what I
introduced in the book, this idea of psychological fortitude. So
(19:00):
rather than mental health, because a lot of times people
hear mental health and they think, oh, well, I'm not crazy,
so that has nothing to do with me. We all
need to have our minds intact. And so I introduced
psychological fortitude as the zero to tend rating of your
ability to be able to take care of your work
and school and family responsibilities, to be able to manage
(19:23):
your emotions. Because, like I was saying earlier, things happen, right,
Stuff just happens. Somebody might say, oh, you speak so well,
things just happen, right. You gave me that face because
you well, it just happened. Last week. Someone sent an email.
(19:44):
They wanted me to speak at a speak at a
conference and they said who should I get in contact with?
This person is white and I sent them my manager's information,
so they put me on a thread. Once they got
everything together and agreed upon this white woman says Michelle,
your management is amazing. You are in great hands. They
were so professional. My team is black. My manager is
(20:09):
Jonathan a Zoo Nigerian. His assistant is Sabrina black woman.
I was like, what did you expect my team to
be other than professional? I couldn't believe it. Like you said,
it's the all your children are so well behaved. I
pray that's not what she meant. A part of me
just wants to believe that maybe she talked to two
(20:29):
other management teams that day and they were not on point.
I'm gonna go with it, and and that was healthy
because the alternative is to get disregulated, like what did
she mean to say something? And then she gets defensive.
You know, you know how these things happen, and this
(20:51):
is why we have to have our psychological fortitude for
the most days seven or higher. So the zero ten
scale seven or higher, zero suggests that we have no
capacity to manage our daily responsibilities, to take care of
our physical health. You know, there's a lot of chronic
health problems in the communities. To tap into our life purpose.
Folks have life purposes sitting on the ground, see just
(21:14):
dying because we don't have any access to our life
purpose because we're struggling with the day to day stuff.
So we can start with being honest with what our
rating is. So right now I could give myself probably
a nine because I'm talking to you, I'm having a ball.
I can not I can do whatever right now. This morning,
when I was jumping out a bed quickly because I
(21:34):
forgot that my son needed to be at school at
eight o'clock rather than eight thirty, I was probably about
a six and a half because I was anxious. I
was like, oh my goodness, we're gonna be late. Did
he eat? I gotta get the lunch together. I was overwhelmed,
but I also knew that that was temporary. Once he
got to school, I would be okay. So if we
can be honest about our zero to ten rating, because
(21:57):
then we can make the adjustments. If in fact, it
was just a regular day and I didn't have the
burdens of trying to get to school much earlier. And
I woke up at about a five. Then I know
that I need to do something different, one or two things.
One remove some of the things that are overwhelming me.
Whatever that is for me. We all have stuff. We
(22:19):
all have stuff, and then to find the joy in life,
so we gotta add in some of the good stuff.
For me, good stuff is easily listening to music, Like
if I'm at a five, I got my music playlist
that I just go to don't even have to think
about it. And music will take us out of a
place you don't know. It takes us from one place
(22:39):
to another. It's like zero to a hundred walking outside
as long as it's not that hot, humid part of
the year. You know, walking outside, I'm good. And I always, always, always,
when I'm in the shower, I'm just in the shower.
So you know, people maybe on occasion you get in
the shower and you just think about everything you gotta
(23:01):
do or everything you didn't do, and rather than just
being in the shower like it's a free spa. It
is a free spa to just feel the water, let
it roll on your neck, in your back, rather than
thinking about the burdens and the pressures of the day.
So I always get that one in. But then when
I noticed my PF is slipping a little bit, then
(23:21):
I'm very mindful about what all I have on my
plate when I'm overwhelmed by and do I need to
just call somebody and say, hey, what are you doing?
Just to kind of get myself into a different frame
of mind. That's so good PF psychological fortitude. And I'm
sorry I forgot to mention the subtitle of your book,
The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health is Navigate an
(23:44):
unequal system learned tools for emotional wellness, which she has
given us some tools, y'all, and get the help you deserve.
How many people are thinking that they don't know that
they can get help, and that they should get help,
and that they deserve the help. So can should and
(24:04):
deserve the help? Powerful? Thank you. You don't have to
suffer and you don't have to be alone. And uh,
a lot of people I can't afford the services of
a therapist. Well, I'm so glad that you gave us
a couple things that don't cost much to strengthen us,
to make us feel okay, even if it's just to
(24:26):
get through the day. I've had to tell two people today,
one day at a time. Sometimes it might look like
one hour at a time, because a day can look
very overwhelming. Like you said, in the shower, where you're
thinking about what to do versus just being present in
the shower. Okay, so y'all get something that smells good,
(24:50):
that lathers up good. Don't get nothing that's gonna dry
your skin, all right, we onlyed nothing that's gonna dry
our skin. Do you feel that we become numb to
these daily assaults, these constant daily assaults on our lives,
And what do those effects look like? I do, and
that there's numbness, and on some level there is a
(25:15):
complacency because of the sense of helplessness. People oftentimes feel
like there's nothing that I can do that's gonna matter,
and maybe even I don't even deserve any better, kind
of like what you're seeing a minute ago. And and
so I understand it. It's also it's a it's a
coping strategy because if you say like nothing's going to change,
(25:37):
then that means you don't do anything that's different, right,
so you just kind of keep doing the same things.
That you've always done. And that's why I talk about experimentation.
I like, I like experiments, and I talked to you know,
supervisees about this where we don't know what's going to
happen if we do something different, that's the experiment. Oftentimes
(25:59):
we'll say, well, it does no matter what I do,
so I'm not gonna try. No no, no, no, no
try And if it works out, won't it have been
worth it? Isn't it an opportunity for learning? But yes,
right now I think we're we're in a place where
folks are disconnected from themselves. They're disconnected from one another,
when what we need is to be able to come
(26:21):
into community. When these microaggressive kind of things happen, like
you know the example that you you know, when folks
are talking outside of the mouth and and you're trying
to figure out what was that about me? What are
they trying to say? Like that stuff takes up cognitive energy,
Like the research shows that it slows us down and
(26:41):
can actually be worse than overt racism, because with overt racism,
you know, it's like we'll forget then it, But microaggression,
it's like what are they trying to say, what do
they expect kind of like you were talking about, like,
and how do I deal with that without them come
back and saying, Oh, I didn't mean it like that,
(27:02):
Oh you took it the wrong way. And so we
have to carry ourselves with grace and with distinction despite
what other people are doing. But it can weigh us down.
And I think that's one of the reasons that we
hear people saying, you know, I'm just so tired, and
we don't even know why they're tired. But sometimes just
existing in this society is exhausting, and that's why you
(27:25):
gotta say, okay, zero ten, where am I right now?
I don't have any control over this person over here.
I only have control over me. What can I do
When a person is saying that they're just tired, that's physically,
it's fatigued. It could be spiritual like you said, I'm
just going to give up. And I had a question
for you about the physical effects of stress and what
(27:47):
that does and some of the symptoms. Like you said,
I'm just tired in every way, What is another symptom
of stress. It's an interesting thing about stress because stress
is in a most basic definition, is anything we have
to react to or anything we have to respond to.
(28:07):
So as an example, my example from this morning, I
gotta get up. Oh my goodness, you know the child
did get to the school on time. He had a quiz,
you got a hundred ye proud of him. But I
had to get out of the bed quickly and move.
It turned out to be a good thing. A wedding,
a marriage, that's a good thing. But people know some
marriages weddings are stressful as all get out. So anything
(28:30):
that requires us to shift and to move and do
something different could be a stress or. Now, when we
get to the point when we're overwhelmed, and I'm sure
folks you know this resonates. It's like you feel like
you can't even think. Yeah, you might not want to
get out of bed because you just don't even know
where to start with all the things you know that
(28:52):
we have on our plate. So if you feel like
I can manage all the things psychological fortitude, you know
it's seven or higher. Do you feel like you can
manage all the things? Then great. When we get to
the point where're just so overwhelmed that we feel paralyzed,
then it's time to make some shifts. And it's time
to make some changes. Now. I know there are some
folks who just keep pushing no matter what they feel like, Well,
(29:13):
I just gotta keep pushing. The consequence of that is
we're not doing as good a job or as effective
a job. We're not bringing our whole selves to all
of our creativity, and so we actually end up working harder.
You know, when you think about the car, if you
got the car and neutral, but then you keep hitting
the gas and expected, yeah, it's not gonna go because
it's in neutral. You gotta be in drive. And a
(29:35):
lot of us don't even have the energy to get
the car and drive because we're just literally out of gas.
So so good. Well, uh, I think we will call
that a little bit of burnout. And we've been hearing
that so much and people are even encouraged. Hey, if
you need to take a different career path, pursue what
you're passionate about. You know, but I will say that now,
(29:57):
even when you pursue what you're passionate about, you're definitely
going to get some stresses. Have you had pushback due
to the research and how you advocate for black people
in this space? Actually, I don't feel like I have
as I sit here and think about it, and I
(30:20):
think a lot of it was timing. So the book
actually came out three weeks before George Floyd was murdered
and three months into the pandemic, and I initially thought, Oh,
this is horrible. I'm not gonna be able to talk
to anybody or or do anything because people are so overwhelmed.
But as you know earlier in the pandemic, it hit
the black and Latin X community is harder than it
(30:42):
hit anyone else. I questioned that we saw some of
our suicide crisis increase in the black community because people
didn't get to go to church, didn't get to connect
with the folks who they could talk to about what
they were experienced, Like folks were disconnected. We started to
see the suicide rates go up while they were going
down nationally. A lot of folks don't don't realize that.
(31:02):
But I think I didn't have pushback because folks were like,
oh my goodness, I feel like I'm losing my mind
because they didn't have the resources that they typically had
access to. And I would even say in the mainstream
society there hasn't been pushed back, but maybe in part
because of this recognition that black people have a different
experience in our society and maybe it's time for someone
(31:24):
to offer some resources and to be honest about that.
So I would say the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. Overwhelmingly.
That's so good, doctor, that you are right as far
as the rates of suicide in the African American community
are skyrocketing unheard of. I think growing up, I had
(31:48):
never heard of anyone that died by suicide that was black.
One of my sister's close friends in the eighth grade
died by suicide was white. Yeah, isn't that heartbreaking? And
the grade very young. I just know where I emotionally
went when I was in the eighth grade, So yes,
my heart still goes out to his friends and family.
(32:12):
But pivoting back to it being in the black community
more so than ever, and you're saying more so since
the pandemic. You know, like you said, people felt hopeless
and cut out from community. Does suicidal thoughts or warning
signs look differently? That's a really good question. And I
(32:34):
will say one thing that comes to mind is people's
reservation about acknowledging thoughts of suicide. And there was a
study that came out some years ago wherein folks who
were in marginalized communities were initially asked about their suicide
and they denied it, and then when they were asked later,
people seem more willing to disclose. People are really very uncomfortable.
(32:58):
And I think, you know, there may the older generations
maybe that talk less about suicide. I think some of
the younger folks are more open to talking about suicide.
It's a leading cause of death. More people in the
US mainstream die by suicide than by homicide. That's not
true in the black community. We have more homicide death
than suicide. But I also just wonder about the undercounting
(33:23):
of Black suicide. So our suicides are more likely than
for other groups to get counted as an accident or
just unknown undeclared. So good, that's so good. But I
always think about this gentleman that I had a conversation
with a few years back, and I asked him about suicide,
and he did acknowledge that he had some thoughts, and
I asked if he had a plan, because we know
(33:45):
that we have to pay attention to not just thoughts,
but the escalating severity when people have a plan, and
I asked him about his plan and he said, no,
no thoughts about that, But then later he could tell
me how he would die. And for me, I really
lies that we have to ask people about more passive
kinds of things that they might do wherein their life
(34:07):
ends prematurely, because that is the case that for Black
people were dying by suicide at younger ages. Then is
the mainstream society where the suicide death rate peaks more
aged fifty years and older, and for us it peaks
more in the twenties and thirties. That's not to say
that we don't have forty year olds and older who
are dying by suicide, but it seems to peak in
(34:29):
younger Black Americans, and I think that we have to
pay attention to that because that means those folks haven't
even had time to begin to live life, like their
contributions to society is much much less because we're dying
at younger ages. But we're also dealing with different kinds
of challenges, say a twenty year old compared to a
fifty year old, And so I do think that those
(34:49):
are the kinds of things for us to be aware
of and that people are dying so that we can
intervene because I started suicide science because I know that
we can prevent deaths, but we have to know, oh one,
that people are dying, and then also that we can
be present for someone. We don't have to save a
life like that's a lot pressure and see I'm gonna
save someone's life. We just have to be there. We
(35:10):
just have to be present and not be judgmental. I'll
stop there because I can. I can talk for a
while about suicide. Well, I want to know in your
research of suicide, what's been one of the most shocking
things that you have found. I will tell you one
thing that did surprise me. And I'm trying to figure
out how to explain this without getting into the nitty
(35:31):
gritty of the statistics and and all of those things. Okay,
so I'll start with what I found consistently is that
for Black Americans who have a strong and positive sense
of what it means to be a black person, who
has a strong sense of spirituality, for those folks, even
when stressful things are happening, it's kind of like her protection.
(35:52):
It's you know, it provides a little bit of a cuckoo.
Stuff is happening. It's like, okay, but I know who
I am, I know whose I am, and I'm good.
So with one study I predicted that, you know, people
might experience depression and they might have fewer reasons to live,
but if they have a strong sense of who they are,
then they're gonna be okay. Consistent with my other results, well,
(36:13):
in this sexual study it was the opposite. So those
who had a strong sense of their African American identity
were more likely to think about the end of their
life if they felt depressed. I'm like, wait a minute,
that's that's the opposite of what it was supposed to be.
My thinking about that, however, is that if you're someone
who really believes in your community, and you're a black
(36:36):
person who believes in who you are, and so family
and friends are important to you, what you're feeling depressed,
that means you don't get to connect in the ways
that are meaningful to you, and so you may start
to think about the end of life. Now, I want
to be sure. Suicide is really complex. You know, I've
broken this down into a number of different variables and
predictors that we talk about. But a person doesn't wake
(36:58):
up one day and start to feel suicidal the next day.
It is a complex mix of that person. That could
be their biology, it could be unmanaged stress, it's going
to be a recent loss like a loss of their
job or a relationship or something important or someone important
to them. Suicide is really very complex. But sometimes we're
(37:20):
able to figure out, like, Okay, what are the things
that people need who are otherwise struggling, so that we
can be a sounding board for them and provide support
so they don't end up in crisis. M that's so
so good this episode. I think we've even said the
words suicide more so than any other episode, and I'm
actually proud of that. Now, listen, I don't want to
(37:42):
normalize the act. I know what it's like to have
those thoughts. I don't know necessarily say that I had
a plan, but I know what songs someone is saying
at my funeral. I knew what flowers still want the orchids.
I say that all the time, like, eighty years from out, though,
please adorn the building revenue with orchids, eighty years from now,
(38:05):
please there. I think they're beautiful. But that is a
word that we did not discuss at all growing up
maybe in church. I have knowledge of a woman who
they said her father died he had pneumonia, but it
wasn't until her adult years that they told her the
truth family of faith. In same with someone who said
(38:27):
that someone died in a car accident, but they had
died by suicide. And I know y'all are wondering, why
are we saying died by suicide and not committed suicide?
And then we're gonna change the subject if it's getting
too heavy. But dr Rita, why was that done within
the past year or so? While at least I got knowledge, like,
(38:47):
don't say this person committed to its side, but say
they died by suicide. Yes, historically suicide was considered a crime.
It was considered criminal behavior, and so people will say
they committed suicide like they committed a criminal act. And
we don't want to associate suicide with with criminality. You know,
folks who are in enormous pain consider taking their own
(39:12):
lives or ending their own lives. And so if we
want to demonstrate some humility, some humanity to people who
are struggling, we acknowledge that suicide is something that happens
to people you wouldn't say that someone commits answer, you
know they died from cancer or died to cancer. But
we want to acknowledge you know that suicide is something
that can happen to folks. It's not any not because
(39:34):
of weakness or because something that's wrong with them, not
a sin, but we want to fully acknowledge what suicide is.
So yes, I appreciate that you asked that question. And yes,
folks were gonna say died by suicide. That's so good.
And listen, y'all. Help is available as we are talking
about this. There is a hotline. I know that can
(39:57):
sound um insensitive to just give some want a hotline,
But the person that picks up your phone call if
you ever have to DIEAL nine eight could really be
that person that encourages you or your loved one to
hold on. I want to scream it with a bullhorn, y'all,
(40:19):
hold on. I don't want to get too loud because
you'd have to turn it. No no, no no, no no no,
but hold on. There is a hotline that is available
twenty four hours a day in various languages. It's eight.
It is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Thank you all
for holding space with us. As we tackled this sensitive topic,
(40:45):
and Dr Rita, you were the perfect person to talk
about care that is not easily accessible in certain communities,
or if it is, people don't know if someone is listening.
By the way, if you're in college, go to the
Student Serves Center. There are some universities that will provide
up to twelve sessions a year. Per semester is either
(41:08):
per semester or per year. So if you're in college,
take advantage. Dr Rita. I'm assuming to certain corporations or
companies that you work for, have you found that they
also provide resources as well? Oh? Absolutely, And I'm glad
you mentioned universities because I come across so many students
who don't know. You're already paying for it, like your
fees are already going towards mental health care. So yeah,
(41:31):
go to the counseling center and get your free care.
And this is primarily for the four year universities. I
don't know about the two year colleges, but it's available.
And yes, employee services for those who have full time job,
it's there. It's one of your benefits. And I know
that people can be hesitant because of concerns about confidentiality,
(41:51):
but licensed professionals are bound to keep your privacy period
and so I I understand that reservation, but it's one
of those things that's an experiment. If you've been struggling
psychological fortitude is hanging out around four or five, then
just give them a call and try it. And don't
assume that just because of the first person didn't work out,
(42:14):
that you can't find someone else who's a good match.
That is well within your rights, because one of the
things we know for sure is that the single most
important aspect of success in psychotherapy is the match, the
personality match between the therapists and the client, even more
so than race. So the personality match between the therapist
(42:38):
and client is important. So if that person doesn't work out,
then go to the next person. And I do also
want to share because a lot of people don't realize
that if you're in a major city and now since
everybody's you know, remote and virtual, in the major cities
where there are research intensive institutions, there are doctoral programs
in clinical psychology where they provide out patient care for
(43:00):
people in that state. And I say that because they
have to be licensed in the state and they provide
evidence base care on a sliding scale. Depending on what
the university is, that scale might slide to zero. But
that's a really good opportunity that a lot of people
don't know about to be able to get affordable care
that is really good, in high quality around the US.
(43:22):
That is awesome information, y'all. As you can see, Dr
Rita Walker and I, we are definitely for your psychological
forwarditude getting the care that you deserve, getting the care
that you need. And by the way, nobody needs to know.
You don't have to scream it from the mountaintop that
you're in counseling therapy. You're that you're unpacking some pain
(43:44):
or trauma or even you can also how about process transition.
You might be a freshman at university and you're like,
this is overwhelming. Who do I talk to about it?
Who do you talk to about Especially, like you said,
if you're the first person in your family to go
to school, no one in your family may understand what
you're going through, albeit they can listen. But I'm I'm
(44:06):
excited that you mentioned that earlier in the episode. You
gave us some amazing tools as far as walking and
being present. Is there anything you might have left out
by the way, y'all. The book definitely definitely talks about
practicing emotional wellness. I would say, give us something then
(44:29):
just cut it off abruptly that to make people have
to go, You mean like drop the MinC and just
walk off. You just dropped drop the mic just now.
I'm just saying, well, what I shared earlier and any
of it will oftentimes sound super simple. But it has
to be simple because if we make it too complex,
folks aren't gonna try it. But then when it's super simple,
(44:50):
folks are like, well, that's not gonna do anything. We
have to try the other. One of my favorite things
to do and to recommend for folks to do, is
to write out the thing that is stressing us the most.
Just you don't even have to have like a journal.
It doesn't have to be fancy. She'll get a Starbucks
napkin and just write down what is upsetting me the
(45:11):
most about whatever the circumstances. Because what we do oftentimes
we just ruminate. We just run the situation and thing
over in our head over and over and over because
we think they're ruminating will somehow give us the answer,
Like I just think about this I'll figure it out.
It doesn't really work that way. When you can write
something down, somehow, it just gives us a different perspective.
(45:35):
It kind of clears the room, in the clutter out
of the mind so that you actually can problem solve
rather than ruminating on the thing over and over again.
That's heavier artillery, you know, after you've go on for
the wall, after you've listen to the music, then you
can sit down and just write what is most upsetting
about fill in the blank. Mm hmm, Doctor Da Walker,
(45:59):
thank you so much for checking in. Thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank you for having me who breathe, just breathe,
because I know I had to breathe. There's so much
going on in this world. And I'm so glad that
(46:21):
Dr Rita was able to come on and just share
some wisdom and some knowledge and expertise. And I like
that she calls it psychological fortitude. When we talk about
the topic of suicide, it's not to be glossed over.
It ain't meant to have jazz hands and Broadway and no, no,
no no. This can be a heavy topic. But the
(46:43):
reason why we kept saying the word is so that
someone whether it's you or someone in your life, will
not be ashamed or afraid. Even if you are ashamed,
you have the courage to share with somebody. Hey, I
feel hopeless. Hey, I don't think I want to live.
I don't have the strength so to say that word.
(47:06):
Whether you're having the thoughts or even a plan, get help.
Please please, please, please please please please get help. Those
words I need help were the three strongest words that
I probably ever said in my life versus I love you,
(47:27):
I need help. You know, shame has to go off
the window, Fear has to go off the window when
you're desperate enough to say, you know what, I can't
go on like this. I need help. So don't worry
if you have to utter those words as well. Again,
you're not alone. I have been there. I know what
it's like. All right. I certainly do love you. I
(47:51):
sure love you. I sure love you. And again, if
you are having thoughts of suicide, please DIALAL nine eight eight.
I don't want it to sound insensitive, but there are
experts designed on that hotline to help you and to
give you some resources that you need. All right, thank
you for checking in. Bye. Checking in with Michelle Williams
(48:26):
is a production of I heart Radio and The Black Effect.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Checking In with Michelle Williams, a production of
My Heart Radio and The Black Effect. Hey, friend, it's Michelle,
(00:20):
just checking in. I'm excited about this episode, but I
want to tell you that it's a possibility that for you,
this episode could be a little heavy because we will
discuss some heavy topics. So prayerfully you listen with an
open heart, you listen with an open mind. And if
(00:42):
this episode is not for you, maybe it's for a
loved one, Maybe it's for a friend or a colleague.
So this episode is going to be very bold in
the topic of mental health and in the topic of suicide.
And I just want to let you know there is
help for you. You You are certainly not alone, and there
(01:05):
are hotlines to call if you are feeling suicidal having
those thoughts. That hotline is nine eight eight. Your girl
has been there. So this is a judgment free zone.
I do want you to know that you can make it,
and that you will make it should you decide to
(01:29):
just hold on another day, I promise you it gets better.
My next guest has some helpful information for you coming
up next. Hey, y'all, welcome to another amazing week of
(01:52):
checking in and Like I said, the three pillars of
checking in is checking in with yourself, checking in with others,
and checking in with God. Our next guest is someone
that I had the pleasure of actually meeting in person twice.
I met her at Charlemagne, the God's Mental Wealth Summit
by I Heart in New York, and then the both
of us we were on Charlemagne Show together and it
(02:14):
was an absolute delight. We had sister girl conversation. She
is amazing a speaker, author, psychologist, and researcher. You've seen
her in many major publications and shows including Red Table Talk,
Ebony b Et. Please welcome the award winning professor again
psychologist Dr Rita Walker. Hi, Michelle, is so good to
(02:38):
be here with you. It is so good to be
here with you as well. How are you? I am
good as far as I know. That's my standard response really,
as far as you know. Could something creep up on
you and you could be like, I'm not okay something
good things happen all the time, right, But based on
what I know, I'm good. I'm good. I know that's right.
(02:59):
I guess we are only responsible for what we know.
So for everybody out there, prayerfully you have the same response,
as far as you know, all is will it? And
I have the same response as far as I know,
and as far as I can look around, it's nothing
but moving boxes because I'm moving. But as far as
I know, I'm okay, that's wonderful, and you're right. We're
only responsible for what we know. Yes, and I probably
(03:20):
look like I've been moving, but I'm not moving for
another few days. Doctor read it. And I have some
help assigned to come and help me pack. But the
way my anxiety is set up, and it's anxiety which
is a little bit of excitement. I started packing myself.
I went to the home depot and got boxes. Anyway,
I was like, I can't why I'm excited. Is that
(03:46):
anxiety or excitement? You know it? Since you said it
was excitement, then we're gonna take your word for it.
I don't know most people who are excited about moving.
But you have to move in the spirit and self conspiracy.
You gotta get you some boxes and move on. To
listen to that voice, we have to anticipating this move
(04:07):
out into something awesome that I am excited about where
I've been living. Guy, I got this spot at the
end of twenty nineteen, and then we were locked down.
And I will say that this place has been a
place of healing and restoration, and the way that I
set my environment up was for healing and restoration. Will
(04:31):
always be healing, will always be needing restoration, but I
need a bigger spot to healing restore. You'll just have
to honor the new space because what you did in
that space obviously worked for that space. And even though
it's a bigger space, you can't just assume you'll bring
what you had in the old space to space. You
(04:51):
gotta move in that space for what it is. Right.
That's so good because how many of us think, well,
if I just moved to another state, if I just
move into a bigger home, a bigger kind, or a
bigger apartment, everything's gonna be okay. But you take that
same dysfunction to the new place, and you have to
make adjustments. And I think we get stuck sometimes, you know,
(05:13):
like it's it's easy to get stuck because it's comfortable.
It's like, well, it's what I know. But we have
to be open to new possibilities, right, And so I understand,
But at the same time, I have to work on,
you know, just being mindful of where I am and
what I'm bringing two different spaces, but still recognizing, you know,
(05:33):
the importance of authenticity. At the same time, we have
to give ourselves room to grow and be bigger. Absolutely,
absolutely authenticity. But even in being authenticity, there are still
room to refine those rough edges. Because I said it before,
I've said it in a podcast or two, where people
say I am authentic, this is just me, and you
gotta deal with it. Maybe it makes a person not
(05:56):
want to work on a few things, especially if you
confront them about something and they say, this is just me.
I'm being authentically me. But I don't know if that's
the truth all the time. I don't know either. I
think a lot of times we are afraid to move
and do things differently because we don't know what the
consequence is going to be. I mean, it really is
(06:18):
easy to to be complacent, to be honest, and to
say yes, that's who I am and that's who uncomfortable being,
and they know how people react to them. But there
are so many of us who know that we could
do something different, we could be something different, and we
need to experiment with that. Sometimes I can talk a
lot about experiments, but we're afraid of how things you
know will will shift. But it's understandable because it's the unknown.
(06:42):
The unknown scares a lot of us. That is so true.
The unknown scares the majority of us. There's very few
people that I know that are just excited about going
into the unknown blind. Even though you have faith, it's
still scary. Like you said, to go into the unknown
confronts some emotional wounds, some trauma, or just be in
(07:05):
a different place that you've never been before, a new city,
a new job. It is a bit scary. Amazing, Well,
we're gonna pivot. You have been up to some powerful
work these past two decades, specifically on advancing the emotional
health of African Americans, and you state something so profound.
(07:26):
Black people do things differently, see things differently, feel things differently. Now,
the question is, as you were pursuing psychology, did you
always know that you were going to create a different
approach to that field when it came to black people.
I didn't. I can't say that I honestly knew. Even
(07:47):
now as people reach out to me and say, oh
my goodness, the book changed my life. It's just I
couldn't have imagined it. I really couldn't have. And when
I decided to pursue the PhD uh in clinical psychology,
I thought that I would maybe do some things for
my community, you know, maybe my neighborhood, maybe my family,
because I really just didn't think that the way that
(08:10):
depression is an example exists for us is the same
as was what was in my undergraduate psychology textbook at
University of Georgia. I just I didn't see it that way.
And if I couldn't see it that way in the
text book, and that meant that we couldn't get help,
there weren't solutions. And so I was thinking, Okay, well
I'll go ahead and get this PhD. My mom always
(08:31):
said you gotta be a lawyer or a doctor. So
I said, okay, I guess we'll we'll you'll get the doctor.
That was my thinking was, I'll get that PhD, and
I'll have a better understanding of our mental health in
context and what it means, so that maybe I could
help some folks and get better insight. Definitely, to go
back to your mom, did she see something in you
that said you can be a lawyer or a doctor, Honestly,
(08:53):
I think it was some of a tradition of what
I've actually heard from other first generation So I'm a
first generation Asian college student. My parents didn't go to college.
But you know, you want to have an honorable, a
noble trade or job or position, and in her mind
that meant going to law school or going to medical school.
And and I accepted that. I was like, Okay, you're
(09:15):
gonna do it right. And I thought I was gonna
go to law school because I actually like to talk
to people. So I thought, Okay, sure, I'll be a lawyer.
And it wasn't until I was an undergrad at Georgia
I had an opportunity to shadow attorneys, and in shadowing them,
I thought it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel
like me, and so I had to go back to
the drawing board. Because most of my life I thought
(09:37):
I was gonna be an attorney. And when I went
back to the drawing board, it was the psychology textbooks
that spoke to me the most, and that's why I
decided to do psychology. You answered no, that you didn't
always know that you would create an approach in the
field of clinical psychology as it relates to black people,
So there was it a particular moment then, because again
(09:59):
the thing that you said something profound is we do
things differently. Black people do things differently. We see and
we feel did something happen that made you have that epiphany?
It's one of those things I think that's always been
with me. And I want to say that, you know,
maybe there was a time in in elementary school, and
maybe there was And I think about how in fact,
(10:19):
in elementary school and by the way, so I grew
up in predominantly black neighborhood church. My schools they vary
depending on where I was. Did you go up in Georgia,
Georgia Native through and through? And I think that I
recognize that even though I love school, I just felt
like I was different. I saw things differently at times.
(10:40):
And I didn't attribute that to me being black or
African American. To be honest, I think I do now
you know different, I have a different perspective. But I
think growing up it was just like, Okay, I kind
of see things a little bit differently, and I didn't
have the language to be able to put culture or
to put African ancestry or history to any of that
(11:02):
it just it's what it was who I was. And
I think that's why I say, like, I don't know
if there was a moment, like I've always just been like,
do what makes sense be you and do what makes
sense to you. Yes, yes, Now, when you said you
went to COOL for clinical psychology, did you do the
track to be a therapist or just research? And because
(11:22):
there are there a few tracks to psychology, if I'm
not mistaken, Yeah, that's a good question. So I earned
my PhD at a research intensive institution, and what that
means is I had the capacity to do research or
well trained and do a research but then I also
had the capacity to see therapy clients, to see patients,
and so I had to see patients. Not to get
(11:43):
licensed license was optional, but I had to see patients
in order to earn the PhD. So I was well
trained to do both. Most people really choose one track
of the other. And one of the reasons that I
decided to take an academic position was because I could
do research. I could answer research questions that mattered to
our community. But then I could also train doctoral students
(12:06):
so that they could be able to provide culturally meaningful care.
To patients independently, so I get to do all the things. Okay,
all right, thank you for answering that. I asked that
because of my acceptance into a school for a psychology
and I just remember there was something where you could
click if you wanted to actually be a therapist or
(12:29):
something else. So yeah, So your book called The Unapologetic
Guide to Black Mental Health. It addresses the lack of
understanding and research in this field for African Americans. I
did a keynote speech for a bioscience organization in Washington,
d C. And there were four of four black people
(12:50):
in the room. Everybody of all other nationalities, even religions
by the way, but only four of us. But the
majority looked like if saw the middle of the street,
they would pass as Caucasian. And one brother got up
and asked the question, what can we do? And I
just hate that, first of all, bring more of us
(13:12):
in the room. There are more black doctors and scientists
PhDs such as yourself. To me, what can we do?
Bring more in the room? Right? It's kind of disappointed
or kind of hurt for US African Americans black people,
and you got a room basically full of white people.
(13:32):
Trying to figure out how to do stuff for us
in the field of mental health. Its mind boggling. See, like,
that's why I do what I do. I mean, it's
sad and it's also not surprising, and it's in part
why I had to write the book, because the same
(13:53):
narratives play out over and over again. You know, we
don't have enough providers. We don't have an of research.
We don't have enough people who understand the nuances of
what it means to exist as a black person in
this society. We don't have enough. Meanwhile, the gatekeepers, who
are the folks who say you get to have a PhD.
And you get to have a PhD and you don't
(14:15):
haven't expanded their worldview on what it means to be
someone who can achieve and be successful and have a
different perspective in this discipline. Uh. And so I talked
to to you know, aspiring graduate students all the time
who could make a contribution. But then I think about
(14:36):
when they get into that classroom, and there are microaggressions
that happened in the classroom, and I know it for
a fact a few decades and I know that they're
still happening. You know, what is it that's happening in
the system that says this is okay one and two
that keeps out the people who can help to change
the system. It's a reality that I don't see chain honestly,
(15:01):
for the foreseeable future until something radical shifts. Now, if
you were the person on the podium, what would you
have said to the young brother who asked that question? Oh,
my goodness, Well, I would have thanked him for the
question to buy myself at the time, recognizing, you know
that it's a it's a tough system to crack. And
(15:21):
then I would say to him to reach out to
the people. And I call them the gatekeepers, so university
professors who he might be interested in working with, you know,
and asking them, you know, what are they looking for
in an applicant. Now, granted, there aren't a lot of
gatekeepers who are open, but there are some. And actually
I did a video on YouTube, one of the ones
(15:42):
that's been watched the most. It talks about how to
get into a doctoral program in clinical psychology because we
don't always know kind of the I won't call it secrets,
but you know, the unspoken language of how to get
into these programs so I think we have to get
folks to be more informed about what they need to do.
You know, you need to have research experience before you
(16:03):
get into a research program. Like that makes no sense, right,
but that is the reality. And I have students that
apply to work with me who don't have research experience,
and so it's not a good fit. And I'm not
gonna set up a student who thinks that they're gonna
go in they're just gonna get good grades and they're
going to be successful, because it takes a lot more
than that. So folks have to be much more informed
(16:24):
about what it takes to get into these programs. We
also need folks who are funding students who are from
different backgrounds. I did my PhD at Florida State University,
where they had a funding program to recruit twenty five
students in the entire state across all disciplines to be
able to earn a PhD. I'm pretty confident that if
(16:47):
the universities didn't have access to that free money, they
would not have admitted the students that they admitted, and
there's only twenty five of us in the entire state.
They would not have admitted the students that they did.
But I was just that Florida State last week and
there were three doctoral students in the clinical site program,
three total. Yeah, I'm sitting upair eyes are big, like
(17:10):
whoa wow. It is very much a pipeline issue. M H.
I think to me to what's been going on in
the country lately create so many stressors, stressors in life
for African Americans black people. Wait, are we supposed to
(17:33):
say African Americans and black people? Because that it's just
I say both because I recognize that not everyone who
identifies as black identifies as African Americans, you know. So
we have our Nigerian family and Jamaican American and Haitian,
and those folks may say that they're black, but they
don't identify as African American. So I use both. But
(17:55):
I used black to be inclusive, got it? And y'all
y'all that are listening, y'all. No, she didn't ask that question, y'all.
I read too much and I've seen where some people
say you shouldn't call us African Americans, you should call
us black, and you know, so, I'm listen, y'all. This
is me, like Dr Rita said in being Inclusive, But
(18:17):
I'm gonna say this, once you've come to America period,
whether you are born in Africa, when you come to America,
you will be viewed as black. So I'm gonna ask
this question and say that the stressors in life for
black people can be very different, especially due to racism,
(18:39):
and there is an emotional toll because of this. Due
to this, What are signed and also what is something
practical we can do today to help help each other
to help each other? Well, I don't share what I
introduced in the book, this idea of psychological fortitude. So
(19:00):
rather than mental health, because a lot of times people
hear mental health and they think, oh, well, I'm not crazy,
so that has nothing to do with me. We all
need to have our minds intact. And so I introduced
psychological fortitude as the zero to tend rating of your
ability to be able to take care of your work
and school and family responsibilities, to be able to manage
(19:23):
your emotions. Because, like I was saying earlier, things happen, right,
Stuff just happens. Somebody might say, oh, you speak so well,
things just happen, right. You gave me that face because
you well, it just happened. Last week. Someone sent an email.
(19:44):
They wanted me to speak at a speak at a
conference and they said who should I get in contact with?
This person is white and I sent them my manager's information,
so they put me on a thread. Once they got
everything together and agreed upon this white woman says Michelle,
your management is amazing. You are in great hands. They
were so professional. My team is black. My manager is
(20:09):
Jonathan a Zoo Nigerian. His assistant is Sabrina black woman.
I was like, what did you expect my team to
be other than professional? I couldn't believe it. Like you said,
it's the all your children are so well behaved. I
pray that's not what she meant. A part of me
just wants to believe that maybe she talked to two
(20:29):
other management teams that day and they were not on point.
I'm gonna go with it, and and that was healthy
because the alternative is to get disregulated, like what did
she mean to say something? And then she gets defensive.
You know, you know how these things happen, and this
(20:51):
is why we have to have our psychological fortitude for
the most days seven or higher. So the zero ten
scale seven or higher, zero suggests that we have no
capacity to manage our daily responsibilities, to take care of
our physical health. You know, there's a lot of chronic
health problems in the communities. To tap into our life purpose.
Folks have life purposes sitting on the ground, see just
(21:14):
dying because we don't have any access to our life
purpose because we're struggling with the day to day stuff.
So we can start with being honest with what our
rating is. So right now I could give myself probably
a nine because I'm talking to you, I'm having a ball.
I can not I can do whatever right now. This morning,
when I was jumping out a bed quickly because I
(21:34):
forgot that my son needed to be at school at
eight o'clock rather than eight thirty, I was probably about
a six and a half because I was anxious. I
was like, oh my goodness, we're gonna be late. Did
he eat? I gotta get the lunch together. I was overwhelmed,
but I also knew that that was temporary. Once he
got to school, I would be okay. So if we
can be honest about our zero to ten rating, because
(21:57):
then we can make the adjustments. If in fact, it
was just a regular day and I didn't have the
burdens of trying to get to school much earlier. And
I woke up at about a five. Then I know
that I need to do something different, one or two things.
One remove some of the things that are overwhelming me.
Whatever that is for me. We all have stuff. We
(22:19):
all have stuff, and then to find the joy in life,
so we gotta add in some of the good stuff.
For me, good stuff is easily listening to music, Like
if I'm at a five, I got my music playlist
that I just go to don't even have to think
about it. And music will take us out of a
place you don't know. It takes us from one place
(22:39):
to another. It's like zero to a hundred walking outside
as long as it's not that hot, humid part of
the year. You know, walking outside, I'm good. And I always, always, always,
when I'm in the shower, I'm just in the shower.
So you know, people maybe on occasion you get in
the shower and you just think about everything you gotta
(23:01):
do or everything you didn't do, and rather than just
being in the shower like it's a free spa. It
is a free spa to just feel the water, let
it roll on your neck, in your back, rather than
thinking about the burdens and the pressures of the day.
So I always get that one in. But then when
I noticed my PF is slipping a little bit, then
(23:21):
I'm very mindful about what all I have on my
plate when I'm overwhelmed by and do I need to
just call somebody and say, hey, what are you doing?
Just to kind of get myself into a different frame
of mind. That's so good PF psychological fortitude. And I'm
sorry I forgot to mention the subtitle of your book,
The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health is Navigate an
(23:44):
unequal system learned tools for emotional wellness, which she has
given us some tools, y'all, and get the help you deserve.
How many people are thinking that they don't know that
they can get help, and that they should get help,
and that they deserve the help. So can should and
(24:04):
deserve the help? Powerful? Thank you. You don't have to
suffer and you don't have to be alone. And uh,
a lot of people I can't afford the services of
a therapist. Well, I'm so glad that you gave us
a couple things that don't cost much to strengthen us,
to make us feel okay, even if it's just to
(24:26):
get through the day. I've had to tell two people today,
one day at a time. Sometimes it might look like
one hour at a time, because a day can look
very overwhelming. Like you said, in the shower, where you're
thinking about what to do versus just being present in
the shower. Okay, so y'all get something that smells good,
(24:50):
that lathers up good. Don't get nothing that's gonna dry
your skin, all right, we onlyed nothing that's gonna dry
our skin. Do you feel that we become numb to
these daily assaults, these constant daily assaults on our lives,
And what do those effects look like? I do, and
that there's numbness, and on some level there is a
(25:15):
complacency because of the sense of helplessness. People oftentimes feel
like there's nothing that I can do that's gonna matter,
and maybe even I don't even deserve any better, kind
of like what you're seeing a minute ago. And and
so I understand it. It's also it's a it's a
coping strategy because if you say like nothing's going to change,
(25:37):
then that means you don't do anything that's different, right,
so you just kind of keep doing the same things.
That you've always done. And that's why I talk about experimentation.
I like, I like experiments, and I talked to you know,
supervisees about this where we don't know what's going to
happen if we do something different, that's the experiment. Oftentimes
(25:59):
we'll say, well, it does no matter what I do,
so I'm not gonna try. No no, no, no, no
try And if it works out, won't it have been
worth it? Isn't it an opportunity for learning? But yes,
right now I think we're we're in a place where
folks are disconnected from themselves. They're disconnected from one another,
when what we need is to be able to come
(26:21):
into community. When these microaggressive kind of things happen, like
you know the example that you you know, when folks
are talking outside of the mouth and and you're trying
to figure out what was that about me? What are
they trying to say? Like that stuff takes up cognitive energy,
Like the research shows that it slows us down and
(26:41):
can actually be worse than overt racism, because with overt racism,
you know, it's like we'll forget then it, But microaggression,
it's like what are they trying to say, what do
they expect kind of like you were talking about, like,
and how do I deal with that without them come
back and saying, Oh, I didn't mean it like that,
(27:02):
Oh you took it the wrong way. And so we
have to carry ourselves with grace and with distinction despite
what other people are doing. But it can weigh us down.
And I think that's one of the reasons that we
hear people saying, you know, I'm just so tired, and
we don't even know why they're tired. But sometimes just
existing in this society is exhausting, and that's why you
(27:25):
gotta say, okay, zero ten, where am I right now?
I don't have any control over this person over here.
I only have control over me. What can I do
When a person is saying that they're just tired, that's physically,
it's fatigued. It could be spiritual like you said, I'm
just going to give up. And I had a question
for you about the physical effects of stress and what
(27:47):
that does and some of the symptoms. Like you said,
I'm just tired in every way, What is another symptom
of stress. It's an interesting thing about stress because stress
is in a most basic definition, is anything we have
to react to or anything we have to respond to.
(28:07):
So as an example, my example from this morning, I
gotta get up. Oh my goodness, you know the child
did get to the school on time. He had a quiz,
you got a hundred ye proud of him. But I
had to get out of the bed quickly and move.
It turned out to be a good thing. A wedding,
a marriage, that's a good thing. But people know some
marriages weddings are stressful as all get out. So anything
(28:30):
that requires us to shift and to move and do
something different could be a stress or. Now, when we
get to the point when we're overwhelmed, and I'm sure
folks you know this resonates. It's like you feel like
you can't even think. Yeah, you might not want to
get out of bed because you just don't even know
where to start with all the things you know that
(28:52):
we have on our plate. So if you feel like
I can manage all the things psychological fortitude, you know
it's seven or higher. Do you feel like you can
manage all the things? Then great. When we get to
the point where're just so overwhelmed that we feel paralyzed,
then it's time to make some shifts. And it's time
to make some changes. Now. I know there are some
folks who just keep pushing no matter what they feel like, Well,
(29:13):
I just gotta keep pushing. The consequence of that is
we're not doing as good a job or as effective
a job. We're not bringing our whole selves to all
of our creativity, and so we actually end up working harder.
You know, when you think about the car, if you
got the car and neutral, but then you keep hitting
the gas and expected, yeah, it's not gonna go because
it's in neutral. You gotta be in drive. And a
(29:35):
lot of us don't even have the energy to get
the car and drive because we're just literally out of gas.
So so good. Well, uh, I think we will call
that a little bit of burnout. And we've been hearing
that so much and people are even encouraged. Hey, if
you need to take a different career path, pursue what
you're passionate about. You know, but I will say that now,
(29:57):
even when you pursue what you're passionate about, you're definitely
going to get some stresses. Have you had pushback due
to the research and how you advocate for black people
in this space? Actually, I don't feel like I have
as I sit here and think about it, and I
(30:20):
think a lot of it was timing. So the book
actually came out three weeks before George Floyd was murdered
and three months into the pandemic, and I initially thought, Oh,
this is horrible. I'm not gonna be able to talk
to anybody or or do anything because people are so overwhelmed.
But as you know earlier in the pandemic, it hit
the black and Latin X community is harder than it
(30:42):
hit anyone else. I questioned that we saw some of
our suicide crisis increase in the black community because people
didn't get to go to church, didn't get to connect
with the folks who they could talk to about what
they were experienced, Like folks were disconnected. We started to
see the suicide rates go up while they were going
down nationally. A lot of folks don't don't realize that.
(31:02):
But I think I didn't have pushback because folks were like,
oh my goodness, I feel like I'm losing my mind
because they didn't have the resources that they typically had
access to. And I would even say in the mainstream
society there hasn't been pushed back, but maybe in part
because of this recognition that black people have a different
experience in our society and maybe it's time for someone
(31:24):
to offer some resources and to be honest about that.
So I would say the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. Overwhelmingly.
That's so good, doctor, that you are right as far
as the rates of suicide in the African American community
are skyrocketing unheard of. I think growing up, I had
(31:48):
never heard of anyone that died by suicide that was black.
One of my sister's close friends in the eighth grade
died by suicide was white. Yeah, isn't that heartbreaking? And
the grade very young. I just know where I emotionally
went when I was in the eighth grade, So yes,
my heart still goes out to his friends and family.
(32:12):
But pivoting back to it being in the black community
more so than ever, and you're saying more so since
the pandemic. You know, like you said, people felt hopeless
and cut out from community. Does suicidal thoughts or warning
signs look differently? That's a really good question. And I
(32:34):
will say one thing that comes to mind is people's
reservation about acknowledging thoughts of suicide. And there was a
study that came out some years ago wherein folks who
were in marginalized communities were initially asked about their suicide
and they denied it, and then when they were asked later,
people seem more willing to disclose. People are really very uncomfortable.
(32:58):
And I think, you know, there may the older generations
maybe that talk less about suicide. I think some of
the younger folks are more open to talking about suicide.
It's a leading cause of death. More people in the
US mainstream die by suicide than by homicide. That's not
true in the black community. We have more homicide death
than suicide. But I also just wonder about the undercounting
(33:23):
of Black suicide. So our suicides are more likely than
for other groups to get counted as an accident or
just unknown undeclared. So good, that's so good. But I
always think about this gentleman that I had a conversation
with a few years back, and I asked him about suicide,
and he did acknowledge that he had some thoughts, and
I asked if he had a plan, because we know
(33:45):
that we have to pay attention to not just thoughts,
but the escalating severity when people have a plan, and
I asked him about his plan and he said, no,
no thoughts about that, But then later he could tell
me how he would die. And for me, I really
lies that we have to ask people about more passive
kinds of things that they might do wherein their life
(34:07):
ends prematurely, because that is the case that for Black
people were dying by suicide at younger ages. Then is
the mainstream society where the suicide death rate peaks more
aged fifty years and older, and for us it peaks
more in the twenties and thirties. That's not to say
that we don't have forty year olds and older who
are dying by suicide, but it seems to peak in
(34:29):
younger Black Americans, and I think that we have to
pay attention to that because that means those folks haven't
even had time to begin to live life, like their
contributions to society is much much less because we're dying
at younger ages. But we're also dealing with different kinds
of challenges, say a twenty year old compared to a
fifty year old, And so I do think that those
(34:49):
are the kinds of things for us to be aware
of and that people are dying so that we can
intervene because I started suicide science because I know that
we can prevent deaths, but we have to know, oh one,
that people are dying, and then also that we can
be present for someone. We don't have to save a
life like that's a lot pressure and see I'm gonna
save someone's life. We just have to be there. We
(35:10):
just have to be present and not be judgmental. I'll
stop there because I can. I can talk for a
while about suicide. Well, I want to know in your
research of suicide, what's been one of the most shocking
things that you have found. I will tell you one
thing that did surprise me. And I'm trying to figure
out how to explain this without getting into the nitty
(35:31):
gritty of the statistics and and all of those things. Okay,
so I'll start with what I found consistently is that
for Black Americans who have a strong and positive sense
of what it means to be a black person, who
has a strong sense of spirituality, for those folks, even
when stressful things are happening, it's kind of like her protection.
(35:52):
It's you know, it provides a little bit of a cuckoo.
Stuff is happening. It's like, okay, but I know who
I am, I know whose I am, and I'm good.
So with one study I predicted that, you know, people
might experience depression and they might have fewer reasons to live,
but if they have a strong sense of who they are,
then they're gonna be okay. Consistent with my other results, well,
(36:13):
in this sexual study it was the opposite. So those
who had a strong sense of their African American identity
were more likely to think about the end of their
life if they felt depressed. I'm like, wait a minute,
that's that's the opposite of what it was supposed to be.
My thinking about that, however, is that if you're someone
who really believes in your community, and you're a black
(36:36):
person who believes in who you are, and so family
and friends are important to you, what you're feeling depressed,
that means you don't get to connect in the ways
that are meaningful to you, and so you may start
to think about the end of life. Now, I want
to be sure. Suicide is really complex. You know, I've
broken this down into a number of different variables and
predictors that we talk about. But a person doesn't wake
(36:58):
up one day and start to feel suicidal the next day.
It is a complex mix of that person. That could
be their biology, it could be unmanaged stress, it's going
to be a recent loss like a loss of their
job or a relationship or something important or someone important
to them. Suicide is really very complex. But sometimes we're
(37:20):
able to figure out, like, Okay, what are the things
that people need who are otherwise struggling, so that we
can be a sounding board for them and provide support
so they don't end up in crisis. M that's so
so good this episode. I think we've even said the
words suicide more so than any other episode, and I'm
actually proud of that. Now, listen, I don't want to
(37:42):
normalize the act. I know what it's like to have
those thoughts. I don't know necessarily say that I had
a plan, but I know what songs someone is saying
at my funeral. I knew what flowers still want the orchids.
I say that all the time, like, eighty years from out, though,
please adorn the building revenue with orchids, eighty years from now,
(38:05):
please there. I think they're beautiful. But that is a
word that we did not discuss at all growing up
maybe in church. I have knowledge of a woman who
they said her father died he had pneumonia, but it
wasn't until her adult years that they told her the
truth family of faith. In same with someone who said
(38:27):
that someone died in a car accident, but they had
died by suicide. And I know y'all are wondering, why
are we saying died by suicide and not committed suicide?
And then we're gonna change the subject if it's getting
too heavy. But dr Rita, why was that done within
the past year or so? While at least I got knowledge, like,
(38:47):
don't say this person committed to its side, but say
they died by suicide. Yes, historically suicide was considered a crime.
It was considered criminal behavior, and so people will say
they committed suicide like they committed a criminal act. And
we don't want to associate suicide with with criminality. You know,
folks who are in enormous pain consider taking their own
(39:12):
lives or ending their own lives. And so if we
want to demonstrate some humility, some humanity to people who
are struggling, we acknowledge that suicide is something that happens
to people you wouldn't say that someone commits answer, you
know they died from cancer or died to cancer. But
we want to acknowledge you know that suicide is something
that can happen to folks. It's not any not because
(39:34):
of weakness or because something that's wrong with them, not
a sin, but we want to fully acknowledge what suicide is.
So yes, I appreciate that you asked that question. And yes,
folks were gonna say died by suicide. That's so good.
And listen, y'all. Help is available as we are talking
about this. There is a hotline. I know that can
(39:57):
sound um insensitive to just give some want a hotline,
But the person that picks up your phone call if
you ever have to DIEAL nine eight could really be
that person that encourages you or your loved one to
hold on. I want to scream it with a bullhorn, y'all,
(40:19):
hold on. I don't want to get too loud because
you'd have to turn it. No no, no no, no no no,
but hold on. There is a hotline that is available
twenty four hours a day in various languages. It's eight.
It is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Thank you all
for holding space with us. As we tackled this sensitive topic,
(40:45):
and Dr Rita, you were the perfect person to talk
about care that is not easily accessible in certain communities,
or if it is, people don't know if someone is listening.
By the way, if you're in college, go to the
Student Serves Center. There are some universities that will provide
up to twelve sessions a year. Per semester is either
(41:08):
per semester or per year. So if you're in college,
take advantage. Dr Rita. I'm assuming to certain corporations or
companies that you work for, have you found that they
also provide resources as well? Oh? Absolutely, And I'm glad
you mentioned universities because I come across so many students
who don't know. You're already paying for it, like your
fees are already going towards mental health care. So yeah,
(41:31):
go to the counseling center and get your free care.
And this is primarily for the four year universities. I
don't know about the two year colleges, but it's available.
And yes, employee services for those who have full time job,
it's there. It's one of your benefits. And I know
that people can be hesitant because of concerns about confidentiality,
(41:51):
but licensed professionals are bound to keep your privacy period
and so I I understand that reservation, but it's one
of those things that's an experiment. If you've been struggling
psychological fortitude is hanging out around four or five, then
just give them a call and try it. And don't
assume that just because of the first person didn't work out,
(42:14):
that you can't find someone else who's a good match.
That is well within your rights, because one of the
things we know for sure is that the single most
important aspect of success in psychotherapy is the match, the
personality match between the therapists and the client, even more
so than race. So the personality match between the therapist
(42:38):
and client is important. So if that person doesn't work out,
then go to the next person. And I do also
want to share because a lot of people don't realize
that if you're in a major city and now since
everybody's you know, remote and virtual, in the major cities
where there are research intensive institutions, there are doctoral programs
in clinical psychology where they provide out patient care for
(43:00):
people in that state. And I say that because they
have to be licensed in the state and they provide
evidence base care on a sliding scale. Depending on what
the university is, that scale might slide to zero. But
that's a really good opportunity that a lot of people
don't know about to be able to get affordable care
that is really good, in high quality around the US.
(43:22):
That is awesome information, y'all. As you can see, Dr
Rita Walker and I, we are definitely for your psychological
forwarditude getting the care that you deserve, getting the care
that you need. And by the way, nobody needs to know.
You don't have to scream it from the mountaintop that
you're in counseling therapy. You're that you're unpacking some pain
(43:44):
or trauma or even you can also how about process transition.
You might be a freshman at university and you're like,
this is overwhelming. Who do I talk to about it?
Who do you talk to about Especially, like you said,
if you're the first person in your family to go
to school, no one in your family may understand what
you're going through, albeit they can listen. But I'm I'm
(44:06):
excited that you mentioned that earlier in the episode. You
gave us some amazing tools as far as walking and
being present. Is there anything you might have left out
by the way, y'all. The book definitely definitely talks about
practicing emotional wellness. I would say, give us something then
(44:29):
just cut it off abruptly that to make people have
to go, You mean like drop the MinC and just
walk off. You just dropped drop the mic just now.
I'm just saying, well, what I shared earlier and any
of it will oftentimes sound super simple. But it has
to be simple because if we make it too complex,
folks aren't gonna try it. But then when it's super simple,
(44:50):
folks are like, well, that's not gonna do anything. We
have to try the other. One of my favorite things
to do and to recommend for folks to do, is
to write out the thing that is stressing us the most.
Just you don't even have to have like a journal.
It doesn't have to be fancy. She'll get a Starbucks
napkin and just write down what is upsetting me the
(45:11):
most about whatever the circumstances. Because what we do oftentimes
we just ruminate. We just run the situation and thing
over in our head over and over and over because
we think they're ruminating will somehow give us the answer,
Like I just think about this I'll figure it out.
It doesn't really work that way. When you can write
something down, somehow, it just gives us a different perspective.
(45:35):
It kind of clears the room, in the clutter out
of the mind so that you actually can problem solve
rather than ruminating on the thing over and over again.
That's heavier artillery, you know, after you've go on for
the wall, after you've listen to the music, then you
can sit down and just write what is most upsetting
about fill in the blank. Mm hmm, Doctor Da Walker,
(45:59):
thank you so much for checking in. Thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank you for having me who breathe, just breathe,
because I know I had to breathe. There's so much
going on in this world. And I'm so glad that
(46:21):
Dr Rita was able to come on and just share
some wisdom and some knowledge and expertise. And I like
that she calls it psychological fortitude. When we talk about
the topic of suicide, it's not to be glossed over.
It ain't meant to have jazz hands and Broadway and no, no,
no no. This can be a heavy topic. But the
(46:43):
reason why we kept saying the word is so that
someone whether it's you or someone in your life, will
not be ashamed or afraid. Even if you are ashamed,
you have the courage to share with somebody. Hey, I
feel hopeless. Hey, I don't think I want to live.
I don't have the strength so to say that word.
(47:06):
Whether you're having the thoughts or even a plan, get help.
Please please, please, please please please please get help. Those
words I need help were the three strongest words that
I probably ever said in my life versus I love you,
(47:27):
I need help. You know, shame has to go off
the window, Fear has to go off the window when
you're desperate enough to say, you know what, I can't
go on like this. I need help. So don't worry
if you have to utter those words as well. Again,
you're not alone. I have been there. I know what
it's like. All right. I certainly do love you. I
(47:51):
sure love you. I sure love you. And again, if
you are having thoughts of suicide, please DIALAL nine eight eight.
I don't want it to sound insensitive, but there are
experts designed on that hotline to help you and to
give you some resources that you need. All right, thank
you for checking in. Bye. Checking in with Michelle Williams
(48:26):
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