email Mental Health Experts Say More African Americans Are Seeking Therapy Due To Images Of Police Violence
Consistent media images of Black death and injury are sparking a turnaround in the way people are looking at mental health.
Published 14 hours ago
Written by Madison J. Gray
The trauma of 2020 in which Black Americans saw continual images of police violence including the killings of
George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and the protests and conflicts that followed, rates of stress, depression and anxiety rose in many communities and for individuals as well. As a direct result, Black Americans now are seeking mental health therapy at increased rates, experts observe.
By Cherranda Smith
May 12, 2021
Growing numbers of Black people across the US are seeking therapy, mental health experts point to the trauma of police violence as the cause. According to a report by
The New York Times, after the murder of George Floyd and repeated images of police violence, mental health help has been in high demand among Black Americans.
At the Creative Kuponya, a mental health practice founded by
Jamil and
Sara Stamschror-Lott in Minneapolis just a few minutes away from where
George Floyd was killed, demand for therapy has “gone through the roof” within the last year.
“We’ve seen everything that the nation has seen from afar, from folks in civil unrest and devastation, despair,” Jamil Stamschror-Lott, who is Black, told
On a cold, bleak morning in Minneapolis, the mood on Wednesday was anything but.
Tiffany Blomgren and her seven-year-old son Greer stood in front of the Cup Foods on the corner of 38th and Chicago, staring quietly at the place where George Floyd, who was black, took his last breaths under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.
Covered in flowers, candles and paintings, the site has become a shrine to Floyd.
His death from asphyxiation when the officer, Derek Chauvin, restrained him last year sparked weeks of global protests and mass unrest across the US, laying bare the racial injustices that have persisted here for centuries and the unequal treatment people of colour frequently endure from police.
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