Black
Children and Suicide
By Albert B. Kelly
When it comes to the issue of mental health and youth, there
seems to be a lack of adequate resources for minority children in general and
black children in particular. Where there are resources available, these may
well be unresponsive to the specific experiences these children face in their
daily lives.
An article entitled Black
Minds Matter (https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/fall-2019
) by Coshandra Dillard written for “Teaching Tolerance” explored certain school
practices that essentially disregard the mental health of black youth. In her
piece, she shared some extremely troubling statistics.
But before we even get to the numbers, acknowledging that
one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to mental health services for youth is absolutely
critical for children of color. Beyond that, acknowledging that minority youth
even need such services might actually be an accomplishment because if the
stats are right, it’s truly a matter of life or death for some children.
I say that because the article cites a 2018 study from JAMA Pediatrics that sifted 15 years’
worth of data (2001-2015) that showed that the suicide rate for black children
between the ages of 5 and 12 was roughly twice as high as it was for white
children in the same age range. That is a shocking statistic that made no
headlines.
As for why this statistic largely stayed under the radar, the
article goes on to cite a 2015 JAMA
Pediatrics study which concluded that because there had been no change in
the overall suicide rate among children in the two decades between 1993 and
2012, the fact that the suicide rate had decreased among white children but increased
for black children had been “obscured”. In other words, they missed it because
it was wash.
If we’re being charitable about it, we could say that those who
should have noticed simply failed to distinguish the signal from the noise or
perhaps they didn’t do a deep enough dive on the data to pick up on the
increase in suicides among black children. That’s if we’re being charitable. But I’m not so sure that “obscured” captures what
happens when it comes to black children.
The article cites studies that demonstrate that black
children are half as likely to receive mental health treatment as their white counterparts.
The reasons are varied, but include a lack of access to mental health services,
being ridiculed or stigmatized for receiving such care, and a lack of
culturally competent mental health practitioners. Also mentioned and I believe equally
important, is the idea of “adultification” which is basically the tendency to
see black children as “older and less innocent than their white peers.”
This matters because it shapes the way some educators
interpret a child’s behavior. In one scenario, a child acting out might prompt
a teacher’s concern and an extra effort to find out if something is wrong
outside the classroom. This child gets some latitude- some slack. With
adultification, that behavior results in some type of punishment with no
thought about what the child may be dealing with outside the classroom. Zero
tolerance.
That’s why the emphasis is on “culturally competent” mental
health services. Without finding fault, a white therapist or teacher raised in
the suburbs will have a difficult time understanding the experiences of a
minority child raised in urban poverty. This is not meant as criticism, but an
acknowledgment that what makes for pressure and stress in one setting doesn’t
always translate into understanding pressure and stress in another.
Cultural competence notwithstanding, if the numbers were
reversed whole segments of society would be raising hell and rightly so, demanding
that something be done as is happening with the opioid crisis now that the devastation
has hit the suburbs and rolled through rural communities. There would be
demands for more teacher training in mental health awareness and more mental
health professionals at schools for students and families.
Earlier this year, it took the Congressional Black Caucus
(CBC) to create an emergency taskforce to study the causes and recommend ways
to improve access to mental health services for black children. It’s a start,
but as the article points out, the front lines are forever in our schools where
educators need to be culturally competent and free of bias. This cannot be
overstated because if they’re not free of bias, implicit or otherwise, they’ll
miss signs and behavior that is really a cry for help will be interpreted as
misbehavior and we’ll lose more children.