How Can We Move Past Minority Mental Health Myths?

Summary: We can move past minority mental health myths through a combination of education, awareness, and open communication.

Key Points:

• Different minority groups live with different myths about mental illness and treatment for mental illness, but most revolve around presenting an impression of strength and self-sufficiency to outsiders.
• For anyone at any time from any culture, asking for help is a sign of strength, rather than an admission of failure and/or weakness.
• People from minority groups can honor their history and traditions while taking full advantage of the benefits of 21^st century treatment methods.

Minority Matters: Debunking Old, Unhelpful Ideas

Most of us carry around inaccurate or false information in our heads without knowing it’s inaccurate or false. And most of the time, it’s harmless. We pronounce a word wrong because we’ve never heard it spoken out loud. We have ideas about history that don’t necessarily match up with actual history. There’s one area, though, where inaccurate or false information can cause problems: our ideas about health and wellness that aren’t based on scientific evidence or medical practice, but rather things we’ve heard along the way.

Myths around minority mental health work in a similar way. Minority mental health myths – in most cases – are things people in minority demographic groups hear parents, aunts, and uncles and people in the community say during childhood and never think to check whether they’re true. To be clear, this happens in all groups of people, not just minorities.

When we’re talking about health and mental health, though, it’s important to understand that myths can and do cause harm. Untreated mental health disorders can disrupt relationships, impair school and work achievement, and prevent people from leading full and productive lives.

In the rest of this article, we’ll list and debunk six of the most common minority mental health myths, starting with the one almost everyone – minority or majority – carries around in their head.

1. Talking About Mental Health Means I’m Weak.

It’s easy to understand why this myth persists. In the U.S., we value independence, self-sufficiency, and self-determination. We like to – and are encouraged to – handle any problems ourselves, without any outside support. When we stand alone, we’re praised, but there’s another side to this. When we stand alone, there may not be anyone there to catch us when we stumble or fall. And we all stumble or fall sometimes.

To move past this myth, we need to understand that humans fare better together, when they cooperate, collaborate, and solve problems in groups. This includes, sometimes, looking to our collective, our peers, and qualified professionals to help with our health and mental health problems.

When we learn that talking about mental health is a sign of strength and asking for help is a sign of wisdom, we can move past this myth.

2. Family Business Should Stay in The Family

We understand this myth, too. It’s directly related to the myth above. It rests on the belief that families should be independent units capable of handling any challenge they face without any outside help or assistance. In the U.S., this applies to minority families – and often immigrant families – who work extremely hard to earn a seat at the table historically denied to them by systemic and structural inequities.

If members of a family believe the first myth as it applies to individuals, then they’ll likely believe the same thing about this second myth as it applies to families. They may think asking for help makes the family look weak, incapable of handling their own business, and in need of outside help to manage difficulties. In fact, the opposite is true: asking for help makes a family look ready and willing to help members of their family heal and grow.

3. Only Crazy People Need Therapy

Here’s our response:

“That’s crazy talk.”

First, let’s unpack that word: crazy is unrelated to any modern concept of mental health and is unrelated to any clinical mental health diagnosis. What people generally call crazy are symptoms associated with psychosis or psychotic disorders, such as delusions and hallucinations, and extreme behavior associated with personality disorders. The thoughts and behaviors may be so atypical they’re difficult to label or contextualize. Therefore, people default to an easy, non-specific, non-scientific word to explain what they don’t understand: crazy.

However, a person who experiences symptoms is not a crazy person, they’re a person with a mental health disorder experiencing symptoms of their mental health disorder.

Evidence-based therapy – techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), motivational interviewing (MI), and others – is for anyone and everyone. It’s for the young, the old, and the middle aged. It’s for people with mild anxiety, moderate depression, or more complex mental health challenges.

Therapy helps a person – any person – understand how their behavior is influenced by their thoughts and emotions. Engaging in therapy can help any person identify, explore, and resolve patterns of thought and emotion that lead to counterproductive behavior, and give anyone who needs them a set of practical, robust tools to manage the symptoms of most mental health disorders.

4. Mental Illness is a White People Thing.

The facts clearly contradict this myth. Anyone can develop a mental illness. Man, woman, boy, girl, young, old, rich, poor, black, white – all humans are vulnerable to mental health issues. Here’s data on rates of mental illness in minority adults, over age 18, published in the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2023 NSDUH):

• Two or more races/ethnicities:
  • Any mental illness: 36.7%
  • Serious mental illness: 14.0%
  • Major depressive episode: 16.9%
• Hispanic:
  • Any mental illness: 20.6%
  • Serious mental illness: 5.3%
  • Major depressive episode: 8.3%
• Black:
  • Any mental illness: 19.4%
  • Serious mental illness: 3.7%
  • Major depressive episode: 6.5%
• American Indian/Alaska Native:
  • Any mental illness: 23.5%
  • Serious mental illness: 3.3%
  • Major depressive episode: 4.2%
• Asian:
  • Any mental illness: 18.1%
  • Serious mental illness: 2.9%
  • Major depressive episode: 4.8%

The data speak for themselves: millions of people from minority demographic groups have clinical metal health disorders. However, this doesn’t change the fact that a large proportion of licensed therapists are non-minority. Here’s the latest data on the percentage of active psychologists in 2023, by race/ethnicity, published by the American Psychological Association (APA):

• American Indian/Alaska Native: 0.12%
• Asian: 4.3%
• Black/African American: 5.5%
• Hispanic: 7.8%
• Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander: 0.03%
• Other: 3.6%
• White: 78.7%

Members of minority groups who prefer to receive support from a minority therapist can use this minority/non-racist therapy finder.

5. Your Mental Health Problems are Because You Don’t Pray Enough

There’s no conflict between being spiritual, having a powerful connection to your concept of God or the divine, and seeking professional support for mental health issues. Consider this: mental health disorders are chronic medical conditions that respond well to therapeutic intervention with medication, lifestyle changes, and other techniques. If you have diabetes, hypertension, or cancer, prayer may be an essential part of your healing journey – but you still go to the doctor, follow orders, and take medication if necessary and recommended.

The same is true for mental health disorders – or should be. They’re medical conditions, which means they have causes we can identify, symptoms we treat, and metrics we can use to measure treatment progress, and all of this can coexist peacefully within the context of a deeply spiritual or religious life and/or worldview. To find a therapist from a similar spiritual background, click here or click here.

6.  My Grandparents and Great-Grandparents Had It Much Worse So I Can’t (and Shouldn’t) Complain

This myth is powerful, but only the first part is true. If you’re from a minority ethnic group, it’s possible your forbears experienced discrimination on a level we don’t see today. That’s true for African American people whose families survived slavery and may or may not be true for recent immigrants and/or 2^nd or 3^rd generation U.S. citizens.  But here’s something that is definitely true: breaking the cycle of generational trauma starts with the individual.

In an article published by the APA, Dr. Alfiee Breland-Noble offers three techniques she uses to help African American clients process the effects of generational trauma triggered by current instances of racism or discrimination:

1. Label, name, and call out racism and discrimination when you see it – and own your right to do so. The same is true for historical racism and discrimination. Dr. Breland-Noble says “I want people to feel comfortable owning and naming our history.”
2. Practice mindfulness, get exercise, and engage in nurturing activities. Grounding yourself firmly in the present moment can reduce rumination about past events and worry about future events and improve overall quality of life.
3. Avoid news stories about race-involved police shootings and avoid content from inflammatory sources or sources you know might contain triggering content.

Minority Mental Health: Examining Our Past to Improve Our Future

It’s important to identify and interrogate our assumptions: that’s how we learn, grow, and change. That’s what we all need to do with our assumptions around mental health. In minority communities, many assumptions about mental health that take the form of myths in need of debunking are simply the result of a lack of exposure to basic information about mental health.

The basic information:

• Mental health disorders are medical conditions.
• Mental health disorders can respond well to treatment with therapy, medication, and lifestyle changes, the same way a medical condition can.
• The earlier a person with a mental health disorder gets evidence-based treatment, the better the outcome.

While some older members of minority communities may need some convincing, that’s okay. You can do it. The best way to do that is through real-world example: if you or someone you know has benefitted from mental health treatment, share that story with your relatives or older members of your community. If they can see with their own eyes the power of recovery, they may learn to resolve old trauma they never knew they had – and you can break the cycle of generational trauma, starting with your generation.