Meet the St. Paul mental health practitioner hoping to inspire other Black professionals to join the field

A former star high school and college basketball player with Rondo roots, St. Paul native Kasim Abdur Razzaq wasn’t sure what he wanted to do after he stopped making buckets. The St. Paul Central graduate, now 44, put his undergraduate degree in psychology to work with young people dealing with behavioral and mental health issues and discovered a calling.

Master’s degrees in clinical social work and education and a doctorate in clinical and counseling psychology followed. Then private practice, working with Black and Muslim communities, people he said have been traditionally marginalized. He plans to use a grant from the Bush Foundation to create a pipeline of Black mental health professionals.

Eye On St. Paul recently talked with Razzaq about his plans for the next two years. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did you go from playing college basketball to mental health?

A: I had got invited to do some [basketball] camps and play overseas. But honestly, when I came back home, I didn’t really know what I was. Basketball was my thing. My brother said, “You got to get a job.” And I was like, I definitely do. He said he worked at this place and “you’re gonna love it.” It was working with kids, basically like a big brother. So I went there. He was right. I loved the work. Right away.

The clinical supervisor was like, “Dude, you’re really good at this work. What do you want to be?” And I was like, I want to be a clinical psychologist. My degree was in psychology. They served youth who had some type of mental health diagnosis. And the work that I did was called a skills worker. And so it was basically looking at their diagnostic assessment and treatment planning goals. And developing skills related to remediation of some of their mental health symptoms.

Q: Sounds like that sparked something.

A: It did.

Q: Now you want to develop a pipeline of other therapists? Why?

A: Black and Muslim communities are marginalized. All of the statistics in terms of mental health support, health equity or health inequities show up in barriers to access, barriers to diagnosis, misdiagnosis, overmedication and lack of services. So, part of the work offering my clinical training but also my community training on how to be with people to show them that social services and mental health services can look completely different. They can be culturally aligned.

Q: What does that look like?

A: My practice is a different perspective. I’m an observer, but also a participant because I’m partnering with the community. And there’s the acceptance and the acknowledgement that the community and the client hold expertise and that I’m collaborating with them.

If a person is being assessed for mental health problems, they have to be debilitated to qualify for clinical significance. But if a person is having problems at work and people are seeing institutional racism, that debilitation could be a manifestation of racism. That’s never part what’s considered in an assessment. If work is debilitating, or school is debilitating, and you happen to be Black or a person of color, what are the implications around racism? And what does intervention look like? Because intervention looks different if that’s the problem.

My work is about bringing people into the field who come from the communities that I work with. Right now, a big part of the work that I do is professional development. I’m working with the school systems and some of their people who have very clinical jobs but they’re not necessarily the social worker or their counselor. People who are in cultural specialist roles. I’m developing something called a Black mental health professional pipeline.

I did some work at the University of St. Thomas. Some of the data that we got was only 2% of mental health professionals in the state are Black.

Q: Your Bush fellowship is to get people into the field who wouldn’t be mental health professionals otherwise?

A: Yep, that’s part of the plan. Be able to take some time away from my full-time job to specifically organize, collaborate, identify, and flesh out what does this pipeline look like? I’ve got two years to kind of slowly roll this thing out.

The idea of a Black professional pipeline came from my work at St. Paul Public Schools with their cultural specialists. These are roles that you can have a degree in it, but you don’t necessarily have to have a degree. And so these roles are lacking professionalization. When I got in, they’re like: “We’re not respected.”

And what I ended up learning was the folks who are in these roles will be phenomenal therapists, phenomenal psychologists. This is an opportunity to not only develop and train them but also to help move them forward in a potential career path.

Q: Was this your first try for a Bush fellowship?

A: No. I tried four times.

Q: And fifth time was the charm?

A: Yeah.

Q: Close your eyes. What do you see two years from now?

A: One, I’m developing a solid business model for how I do this work. And two, that I’m developing and bringing, and improving the workforce that creates both representation but also a different way of being and doing the work.