Mental Health in the African Immigrant Community

Recently, at a meeting of social workers serving African immigrants, I brought up the issue of mental health. "We don't have a problem with mental illness in the African community," a caseworker told me, citing the resilience of a population largely familiar with extreme poverty, human rights abuses, and instability.

Later, after everyone else had gone, another caseworker who leads support groups around depression said, "They won't use that word, but they're depressed." Instead, she said, "they say they are ‘worried' or they ‘think too much'-it's almost impossible to get them into counseling."

The caseworker sighed. Mental health, she admitted, is "the only piece of the puzzle we don't know how to deal with."

"In Africa, if you say you are sick, it means you are dying. If you ask for psychiatric help, it means you are crazy," a third caseworker from Mauritania told me. Cultural barriers add to a fear of institutionalization that most immigrants believe will result in deportation, ending their chances of staying in America and supporting families back home.

This winter, I will produce a radio documentary profile of an African immigrant struggling with mental illness to air on NPR's Latino USA. I'm planning to collaborate with Francophone and Anglophone radio programs in New York City aimed at African immigrants, such as WPAT 930AM, a community radio station that serves African communities with daily programming. I hope to rebroadcast the documentary profile and collaboratively produce several call-in programs with existing hosts, guests from the profile, and community leaders to encourage listener participation through an outlet popular with African immigrants.

I see an urgent need for conversation around mental illness within African immigrant communities. The African immigrant population in the US has increased over forty-fold since 1960, growing from 35,000 to 1.4 million. This population rarely receives media coverage commensurate with its size, on any topic. The goal of this project as a whole is most simply to shed some light on the unique barriers that African immigrants face in terms of seeking out mental health care, and to offer one way to open up a conversation within African communities on an issue that is controversial and rarely acknowledged.