Is Mental Illness for White People?

My mother always told me to try not to be too happy. Or else I would go out into the street and get hit by a car.

Growing up in the 1980s, in a very specific corner of Black middle-class America, I was taught that the key to survival was to maintain a steady, low-level of hopelessness at all times. My parents saw nothing wrong with a little “depression” or a little “feeling bad.” Indeed feeling bad, they believed, was preferable to feeling good, lest life decide to take one down a peg.

My parents had themselves been constantly disappointed by life, and they tried hard not to hide it. For them, racism — the endless cycle of macro- and micro-aggressions to which the average Black person was ordinarily subjected — had led to intermittent bouts of sadness, despondency, and despair.

In preparation, my sister and I were schooled that life would be nasty, brutish, and short. We would always have to work twice as hard as white people; some who we thought were our friends would turn out not to be; many of our dreams would be deferred, if not outright denied.

Always a good girl, I kept my nose to the grindstone and my expectations low. I never dreamed of happiness. Happiness was suspect. Contentment, downright rebellious.

By the time I reached law school in the '90s, however, mainstream society had declared that intractable malaise was the symptom of a chemical imbalance, a mental illness. "Clinical depression" became the diagnosis du jour, and popping Prozac and writing a memoir about it was the thing to do.

Increasingly unable to get out of bed, I looked for a name to my malignant moods and found one. First: "depression." Later: "bipolar disorder type 2." (Most recently: "treatment-resistant, schizoaffective atypical bipolar disorder with mixed features and borderline traits." But that’s a long story.)

Although my parents despised my moping, anhedonia, and laconic withdrawals, they scoffed at any diagnosis of a mental illness. “Mental illness is for white people,” they said. As, apparently, were talk therapy and medication. There were no slaves slipping off the plantation for therapy sessions, I was reminded. There were no sharecroppers on SSRIs.

Depression was not pathology, my parents told me; it was nothing more than an intrinsic part of the Black experience. However, their advice to take walks outside (father) or to wear lipstick and lose weight (mother) was not at all helpful in soothing my spiraling suicidality.

And so I decided to embrace conventional psychiatry. Ironically, I felt less stigmatized by calling myself mentally ill than I had felt on the other repressed, lonely extreme, where sadness was for sissies and crying was considered so radical as to inspire the reproach “Two tears in a bucket, motherf**kit.” The majority was free, I felt, in a way that Black people weren’t, to express vulnerability and acknowledge real emotions.

For me, calling myself mentally ill was a rejection of Blackness, and what I considered to be a parochial and oppressive way of viewing the world. I actually wanted to be happy, and I saw nothing wrong with white people’s expectation that we all could and should be.

And, yet, today, 30 years down the road, I have had every diagnosis in the DSM, I have taken every medication the pharmaceutical companies have developed, I have consulted therapists from every school of thought, but I remain “feeling bad.”

In order to save my own life, I have had to look for solutions beyond both the narrative promoted by my parents and that of the psychiatric establishment.

There is power in understanding depression, as my parents do, as a fact of human existence as opposed to a disease or disorder. Sadness is not merely a symptom to be medicated away; it is often connected to real phenomena, whether in one’s life or in society at large, that need to be explored.

However, the response to despair cannot be to adopt a steely stoicism, or to declare that “Mental illness is for white people.” While different cultures may have divergent views as to what is “normal” and what is not, only the individual can judge what feels right for them and when to seek help.

Like the good girl I am, I still don’t do happiness. Although there is nothing wrong in aspiring to be happy, that state of mind is indeed fleeting. Reality, day-to-day life, is much more banal. I aim for the middle — something between exuberance and despair.

I am finding that the key for me is to acknowledge my feelings of hopelessness and malaise, as well as the circumstances from which they arise, and to not allow them to overwhelm me. This, for me, is sustainable. This, for me, should be considered the mainstream.