Getting access to resources for mental health and seeking help can be exhausting, especially for youth of color, whose issues are not always seen as genuine or worth prioritizing. However, for mental health professional and 2023 Bush Fellow Neerja Singh, it is a passion to prioritize this population.
"I strongly believe that mental health is an integral part of overall health," Singh said.
Singh faces frustrations, challenges and compelling experiences in dealing with the intersectionality of race and mental health while working in the field. She has witnessed the cultural stigma in ethnic communities and observed that a lot of children of color do not have the same amount of access to quality care that a lot of white kids do.
"Especially for students of color, they do not get to see providers who speak their language, who look like them, who can really understand their struggles," Singh said.
She went on to elaborate that microaggressions that would be caught by someone of the same race are not as easy to notice for another racial group.
It does not click naturally for schools to notice these passive-aggressive behaviors, especially when the staff are mostly white and there is a lack of push toward creating spaces for racial minorities, she explained. It is not classified as bullying; it is pushed off to the side, which only worsens the mental health of children of color. Not only that, but a lack of support from families can add to that, she said.
"I belong to an Indian family. Still, everything is about grades," she recalled.
She explains how the culture she grew up in prioritized GPA and did not care much for health. Because of the stigma around mental health, a lot of people around her found the concepts of trauma, anxiety and depression perplexing.
