This volume details the self-reported stress of being Black in the United States, and documents the cultural resources African Americans draw upon to overcome adversity and maintain a positive, healthy perspective on life. Based on data obtained from a United States National Survey of Black Americans, the book first discusses psychological and sociological factors affecting life satisfaction. Contributors then explore how these psychosocial factors contribute to such health problems as alcoholism and hypertension. The volume concludes with an examination of strategies Black Americans use in their attempt to solve life problems. These include: prayer; avoidance; active problem-solving; and seeking help from family, community

The experiences of both black patients and the black mental health professionals who serve them are analyzed against the backdrop of the cultural, societal, and professional forces that have shaped their place in this specialized health care arena.

In Mental Health among African Americans: Innovations in Research and Practice, Erlanger A. Turner presents a new theoretical framework that emphasizes culturally sensitive clinical practices and Afrocentric values in order to address the lower rates of African Americans seeking medical treatment in the United States.

An unapologetic exploration of the Black mental health crisis—and a comprehensive road map to getting the care you deserve in an unequal system. We can’t deny it any longer: there is a Black mental health crisis in our world today. Black people die at disproportionately high rates due to chronic illness, suffer from poverty, under-education, and the effects of racism. This book is an exploration of Black mental health in today’s world, the forces that have undermined mental health progress for African Americans, and what needs to happen for African Americans to heal psychological distress, find community, and undo years of stigma and marginalization in order to access effective mental health care. In The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health, psychologist and African American mental health expert Rheeda Walker offers important information on the mental health crisis in the Black community, how to combat stigma, spot potential mental illness, how to practice emotional wellness, and how to get the best care possible in system steeped in racial bias. This breakthrough book will help you: Recognize mental and emotional health problems Understand the myriad ways in which these problems impact overall health and quality of life and relationships Develop psychological tools to neutralize ongoing stressors and live more fully Navigate a mental health care system that is unequal It’s past time to take Black mental health seriously. Whether you suffer yourself, have a loved one who needs help, or are a mental health professional working with the Black community, this book is an essential and much-needed resource.

In Black Mental Health Matters, renowned Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Aaren Snyder uses years of experience to increase mental health awareness in the black community, through captivating real-life stories and simple, down-to-earth explanations of complex psychological problems that impact the black community.

A powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America. This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the two covers.