by Dora Muhammad, Contributing Writer
The news headline, “Hurricane Erin explodes into monster category 5 storm in the Caribbean,” welcomed me the morning I sat down to finish editing this column—one I began writing last October. How befitting, for it captured the evolution of mental health over the past year. Mental health became a focus in October after an older brother who struggles with a mental illness went missing.
Mental health remained my topic to address holiday season depression. Then the November election results kick-started psychological exhaustion from inauguration to the first 100 days benchmark in April—DEI attacks, diabolical deportations, federal firings, agency gutting, and the erasures enabled by the EO, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” True are the words of one of Project 2025’s crafters, Russell Vought, when interviewed in February: “We want to put them in trauma.”
When July’s National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month arrived, I could amplify the community’s needs while redressing the erasure of the “Bebe Moore Campbell” from its name to preserve the July observance’s recognition of the trailblazing mental health advocate. Her first and final novels, “My Blues Ain’t Like Yours” and “72-Hour Hold,” center on familial mental health and express her experiences with her daughter, actress Maia Campbell, who lives with bipolar disorder and struggled with substance abuse.
Campbell stressed education on brain disorders and traumatic stress of people of color to end the shame, stigma, and secrets that lock families into denial of relatives who are not in control of their minds. Choosing not to get help often leads to self-medicating and substance abuse, seeking crisis care at emergency rooms, getting locked up in local jails, and living on the streets. The policy cycle has come full circle—we are facing mid-19th century conditions that propelled psychiatric asylums as the solution to significant numbers of the mentally ill among residents in nursing homes, SROs, and the streets struggling with disabilities, substance abuse, low-income, and/or unemployment.
Now in August, Section 2 of Project 2025 is alive on the streets of Washington, D.C., targeting the homeless, an early action of Nazi Germany’s social cleansing masked as public safety. It’s a thin cover for the militarization of our neighborhoods to terrorize our youth in street patrols and intimidate immigrants in street checkpoints, verifying citizenship status. The sinister hand of government repression is exposed in the push to end consent decrees to adopt “maximally flexible” standards for arrests while avoiding the roots of homelessness—high rents, no living wage, and the erosion of social safety nets.
Nevertheless, D.C.’s occupation helps sharpen focus on funding cuts that broke the mental health care infrastructure. The deinstitutionalization movement began with JFK’s 1963 Community Mental Health Act, aimed to “end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of persons with mental health disorders.” A better reform would have been to improve the squalid conditions of state hospitals and enact accountability measures to curb patient abuse. When Reagan repealed Carter’s 1980 Mental Health Systems Act, he converted funding for specific care mandates into broader Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health block grants, hiding massive funding cuts in the budget bill. Federal policy compelled community-based organizations to shoulder the burden of mental health care and then cut their purse strings.
As we move into September’s focus on Alzheimer’s, I want to elevate brain health vanguards for the Black community, The Balm in Gilead, Inc. Every day, America becomes more like Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, and we need daily balm for our sanity. To ease the taut rubber bands that keep our minds from exploding in the chaos, I offer my collection of affirmations, Speak Kindness. Choose one. Or a prayer, scripture, poem, lyrics, or quote. Or simply inhale… exhale. Every day. Breath is life. Choose wisely. I also invite you to join me on September 28, virtually or in person in Philly, for an exhibit reception and artist talk, Sanctuary at Mother Bethel. We can become balms of sanity for one another.
Dora is the founder of The AWARE Project (Advocacy for Women’s Activism, Rights and Empowerment) and convener of Creative Grace Conversations. She serves as Faith in Public Life’s Theologian in Residence and the Institute of Caribbean Studies’ Ambassador to Women.
