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“I think that is the awakening that's happening, that there is an intersection of identities that impacts the way that we engage with our mental health and the world around us, no matter who we are, where we come from, what we look like.”
that news stories about traumatic events can have a big impact on people, especially if they consume a lot of them. Breland-Noble said there’s a term for that: vicarious trauma, which can be even more affecting for people who share the racial background of the victims.
“Witnessing people being attacked, that is traumatizing,” she said. “We're looking at people who literally look like us; they could be our family members.” As an Asian woman, I expected the news to hit me harder than it did others, but I was still surprised at the obvious downturn in my well-being. I’ve worked in online media for several years, through a Trump administration, innumerable instances of mass shootings and police violence, and a pandemic. It wasn’t that I wanted to be numb, but why did it feel different?“It depends,” Wang said when I asked her why I might be in denial about the deleterious effects of the news, but she had some hypotheses. “For a lot of Asian Americans, we largely have been told that our experiences with racial trauma have not been severe enough; they have not sometimes even been acknowledged or validated. So sometimes when we watch these attacks and these experiences, it is triggering a lot of our past racialized experiences and trauma that have largely been unprocessed.” She added that with the cumulative effect of living through the pandemic and witnessing police officers brutalize Black Americans, we may already be at our limits when it comes to keeping ourselves from feeling overwhelmed. So what can people of color do to take care of their mental health, knowing that the tenor of the news is unlikely to change? Breland-Noble recommended that people, as much as they are able, turn off the news or limit how much of it they consume. “I think the other thing is making sure that if you find yourself exposed, you find ways to replenish what you've lost,” she said. Meditation, exercise, creative hobbies like painting, or getting out into nature are ways “to clear your mind and find a comfortable place of peace.” She also suggested having some way to process your emotions — which could mean therapy or simply talking to someone who’ll understand what you’re going through. It must be said that communities of color have always taken care of themselves, even if their methods have only recently become mainstream in the US. “Our healing practices have been stigmatized —— and oftentimes co-opted,” Li said. “White people take over and go, ‘Yoga, meditation, mindfulness, that is actually good for mental health. Now, let me sell that back to you.’” Even so, Li said, reclaiming traditional practices can be empowering for people of color. Still, being a therapist of color who works with clients of color is no easy task. “We have to help our clients, but we're also dealing with a lot of the same concerns and issues,” said @blackfemaletherapists’ Dee. “It is retraumatizing every time you see something else happening. And we're all experiencing it as a community.” The people running these popular Instagram accounts are potentially speaking to hundreds of thousands of people daily. “I'll be completely honest with you; I grapple with it every day. What does it mean to feel this pressure to speak to such a large community and try to help every single person feel seen or help every single person feel like they belong? Because I can't do that, right?” Kohli said. Being active on Instagram also opens them up to demands they can’t necessarily meet. “I have been very honest on my stories, and in my highlights, that I can't respond to every DM,” Kohli said. “People sometimes expect access to you when you're online. And I just want to remind people that I'm one person. It's been interesting because I get caught in a loop. I'm a therapist-in-training. I have this platform. People look up to me. But I'm also struggling through the exact same thing as everyone else: the social justice movements, a pandemic, my own impostor syndrome, feeling isolated.” It’s a reminder that mental health is holistic — affected by everything and anything, with no one right way to address it. And as I discovered, just because you know the path, that doesn’t mean you can automatically take it. Still, these practitioners are providing a map, one that charts new and surprising territories. “One of the things that I really learned from building @browngirltherapy is that my content has been able to give people language,” Kohli said. “Having language to name what you feel, what you think, what you're experiencing, can be such a powerful thing. It helps fight shame and the stigma against mental healthcare.” Li added, “The capitalistic mental health field that tries to sell people therapy and mental health makes it sound really complicated. But at the core of healing is when people feel heard, understood, validated, supported.” Knowing all this — even knowing that tending to my mental health is a perpetual process — is a strength. So is recognizing that my well-being isn’t the only end goal. “I always wanted to practice in such a way that ties everything together because I don't feel like healing happens in a vacuum,” Morales said. “To me, the end goal of helping people overcome trauma is also to help them find a meaning or a way to contribute to the type of world that they want to see.” ●
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