Mental Health Impacts on Race and Culture

In the Black, immigrants, youths, and visible minority population in Canada, the rate of mental illness is approximately 55 percent greater due to structural and institutional racism and marginalization. A serious realization for Black youths is acknowledging the proverbial reality of completing high school or going from school to prison pipeline is serious and complicated reality. 

Blacks youths at the elementary level, do not know how to verbalize what they are supposed to feel when they are in school and face with dimensions of adversity. This is the stage when they are most vulnerable to succumbed to racism, demoralization, and exclusion, leaving them to feel or become physically sick followed by the onset of mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. 

Blacks youths and immigrants families from diverse marginalized backgrounds are underrepresented when accessing healthcare, under-diagnosed when reaching out to get mental health services, and are being over diagnosed and misdiagnosed due to lack of adequate understanding and mistrust of the system that ails them physically, and mentally. 

People of colour have been placed in an oligarchy what is called “Pandora’s Box,” a systematic belief stemmed from slavery and exists through colonization. It is an upheld generational belief that our mind, what we feel, and our behaviour, is devoid any humanistic importance or favourably nurturing. 

Numerous academic reports have shown black males are five times more likely to be incarcerated, black males without formal education have strikes against them as they are highly favoured to be incarcerated, be overrepresented in the judicial system and underrepresented with seeking equal justice.