This July started in 2008, when Congress designated it Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month — named for the author and advocate who spent her life pushing to destigmatize mental illness in Black and underserved communities before her death in 2006. Her legacy deserves to be named and honored.

But I use “Black Mental Health Month” instead of “minority,” because that word is already out of date. Non-Hispanic white Americans still hold a narrow national majority today — around 56% — but that share has fallen from nearly 90% in 1940, and the Census projects the country goes “minority white” by 2045. Among people under 18, we’re already close to even. The demographic story of this country is shifting fast, even as the mental health system built around “minority” language hasn’t caught up. Part of why that lag persists is fear — what Dr. Joy DeGruy and others call White annihilation, the fear that as the number of people of color grows, white America loses control and power. That fear shapes policy, funding, and systems. It’s also, in its own way, generational trauma — passed down as a fear of losing what was built on our backs.

Black Mental Health

Society pours its research and funding into the mental health of white people. Meanwhile, Black people — a fast-growing share of this nation’s present and future — get a fraction of the attention, and the numbers show it. Only 39% of Black adults who reported a mental health concern actually received care, compared to 52% of white adults. We make up over 14% of the U.S. population, yet just 2% of psychiatrists and 4% of psychologists are Black. More than 1 in 20 Black adults reported serious thoughts of suicide in recent national data. These aren’t gaps. They’re the footprint of generational trauma left untreated at a systemic level.

Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome gives language to what so many of us carry without ever having words for it — historical trauma, generational trauma, and daily oppression, compounding. Naming the weight is the first step. Transforming it is the work.

Ancestral Healing Practices

I wouldn’t be a cannabis educator if I didn’t mention plant medicine’s complicated role in this generational story. The War on Drugs criminalized cannabis in Black and Brown communities and left damage still passed down household to household. Even now, cannabis as medicine is often out of reach — too expensive, or gatekept behind narrow qualifying conditions — while unregulated, laced product floods our neighborhoods and hits our youth hardest, adding new trauma on top of old.

And still, the benefits are real: fewer side effects than many pharmaceuticals, a history of medicinal use older than Western medicine itself, and an option for those of us carrying justified mistrust of a system that hasn’t always served us. Used with intention, it’s one small way of transforming harm into healing instead of letting it pass to the next generation unchanged.

Healing Black Mental Health

It’s time we lean into AI — not artificial intelligence, but ancestral intelligence, a phrase I borrow from Dr. Jennifer Mullan, author of Decolonizing Therapy.

Ancestral healing is what our people used before therapy, psychiatric medicine, and wellness culture got monetized and priced out of reach. Real healing, real transformation of what’s been handed down to us, doesn’t have to cost $200 a session. It can look like:

• Movement — dancing, yoga, boxing, line dancing, twerking, anything that feels like release instead of punishment.
• Community — porches, kitchens, cookouts, the barbershop, the beauty shop.
• Storytelling — passing down what got us through, so generational trauma isn’t the only thing inherited.
• Rest — reclaiming rest as a birthright our ancestors were denied.

This is the work: naming what was passed down to us, and actively transforming it into something the next generation doesn’t have to carry the same way.

If this resonated, share it. Send it to someone who needs the language for what they’re carrying. Post it, forward it, put it on your story — the more of us saying this out loud, the more normal it becomes to transform generational trauma out loud too.

— Kevnesha Boyd, LPC

Transforming Generational Trauma