Depression Is Colorblind

All races are vulnerable to the blues.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on September 01, 2003 - last reviewed on April 13, 2007

At first I thought: How absurd. A white woman writing about depression in blacks. And why it's often hidden from view, which is to say, from official (largely white) psychiatric channels. What credibility could I have?

Then, in the running talmudic debate I almost continually conduct with myself, it dawned on me: I don't suffer from clinical depression, yet I write credibly about it. I don't have to be black to write about depression in blacks. I just have to do what I do for every article in every issue—conduct the right research, talk to the right sources and report on what I've gathered.

That's the beauty of being a journalist. You don't have to experience everything directly to say something meaningful about it.

I made every effort to talk to the right sources. In the background was the 1999 Surgeon General's first-ever Report on Mental Health highlighting problems as they played out in many ethnic groups.

But it wasn't until I was at a conference last spring at the University of Michigan that comments by a couple of the speakers moved the topic up towards the front of my mental filing cabinet. The conference was on depression on college campuses, a topic that had a year earlier filled an entire issue of Blues Buster (May 2002). There was a panel discussion on the effect of culture and gender on students with depression.

Psychologist Stacey Pearson, Ph.D., of the university's counseling center made a point that is still reverberating in my brain. Connectedness is at the heart of African American culture. And at the heart of depression is disconnectedness. A disconnect from one's feelings, from one's body (leading to the predominance of somatic symptoms) and from one's friends. Depression also makes African Americans feel disconnected from the larger society, she stressed—a statement with largely unexplored political ramifications.

Also on the panel was psychologist Harold W. Neighbors, Ph.D., who discussed the reluctance of blacks to seek help for depression—and the higher risk of misdiagnosis they experience when they do. He talked about the need for mental health education not just of consumers but of providers, who could stand to be much better informed about the role of cultural issues regardless of their race.

Call me naïve. But I hadn't devoted a lot of thought until then to culture-specific experiences of depression. Like many other culturally attuned people, my adulthood was marked by the shrinkage of Freud, which is to say, a growing awareness of how bound his views were to the Jewish bourgeoisie of late 19th and early 20th century urban Europe. But I hadn't thought much beyond that.

At the Michigan conference I also spoke to a very bright college student who had attempted suicide several times. Caught between two cultures, it was the only way she could get her parents—first generation Koreans, hard-working, affluent—to accept that she was very depressed and needed help.

So when I received notice of Maryland psychiatrist Marilyn Martin's book, Saving Our Last Nerve, I decided it was time to swing into high gear. Martin turned me onto the pioneering efforts of California psychologist Gloria Morrow, Ph.D., to reach into the black community. And my own research led me to Dr. Carl C. Bell of the University of Illinois in Chicago. It's scarcely possible to sum up his own contributions both to research and to community health. Early one summer weekend morning, by phone, he gave me the short course on depression in African Americans.

He also gave me another course, one that didn't fit into the space constraints that make me tear my hair out every issue. But worthy of a discussion in its own right. Yes, African Americans get depressed. But they are also extraordinarily resilient. And we probably all have lessons to learn from them about it.