Vulnerable:
Brandon Marshall and the Challenge to Mental Health Treatment Inequality
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
On Sunday, amid all the hoopla about the start of NFL training camp, player movement, and the start of the NFL season, Brandon Marshall quietly told the world a secret, announcing that he was living with a Borderline Personality Disorder.
Right now today, I am vulnerable, I making myself vulnerable, and I want it to be clear that this is the opposite of damage control. The only reason I am standing here today is to use my story to help others who may suffer from what I suffer from, from what I had to deal with. I can't explain to you and paint a vivid enough picture for you guys where I been in my life, probably since the end of my rookie year.
Noting that neither the cars nor the fame, neither the success on the field nor the joys experienced off the field resulted in happiness, Marshall highlighted the despair that he has experienced during his life:
I haven't enjoyed not one part of it and it's hard for me to understand why . . . . One of the things I added to my prayer was for God to show me my purpose here. When I got out of the hospital, I called my videographer and I said, Rob, grab your camera and just come to my house and just start shooting. I said I'm very depressed right now, I probably won't talk, I probably won't even leave my theater room, but you just shoot and don't stop shooting. I said, I don't know where we're going with this, I don't know what's going to come out of this, but something good is going to happen.
Marshall is not the first high-profile African American athlete to publicly document the struggles with mental illness. Several years ago, Ricky Williams spoke about his illness (Social Anxiety Disorder) “to up the awareness and erase the stigma." Likewise, Ron Artest, who has publicly acknowledged his own disease, has gone beyond chronicling his own story, testifying before congress while raising money (through auctioning off his championship ring) for mental health awareness among youth.
The reaction to Marshall’s revelation, like that of Ron Artest and Ricky Williams, illustrates the ways in that definitions of black manhood curtail public discourse and treatment of black mental illness. Responding to Ron Artest courageous announcement about his own mental health struggles, Mychal Denzel Smith offered an important context:
Black men don't go to therapy, they go to the barbershop." I can't count the number of times I've heard this throughout my life, nor relate how embarrassed I am to have actually believed this at one point. The resistance black men exhibit toward mental health awareness is astounding. The belief, in my estimation, is that admitting to and/or seeking help for a mental illness makes one less of a man. We have come to define masculinity/manhood as "strong," meaning silent, emotionless, stoic and uncaring. To our detriment, black men have accepted, embraced, and perpetuated this idea and left a community of emotionally stunted black men so repressed that the mere mention of a psychiatrist is met with a chorus of hearty laughter. It doesn't prevent us from suffering at the hands of mental illness, it's just that black men prefer to self-medicate with marijuana and Jesus (not necessarily concurrently).
Marc Lamont Hill also focuses on context, providing an important historic reminder as to why African Americans (beyond culture, machismo, or cultural practices) often resist and otherwise dismiss mental health challenges:
Since slavery, the American scientific establishment has functioned as an ideological apparatus of White supremacy by advancing and normalizing claims of Black moral, physical, and intellectual inferiority. As a result, the last four centuries have witnessed the production of deeply racist beliefs and practices that justify the abuse, exploitation, and institutionalization of “flawed” and “diseased” Black bodies. . . . By using mental illness to justify the denial of full humanity, freedom, and citizenship to Blacks, as well as ascribe mental pathology to those who operate against the interests of the White supremacist capitalist State, the American medical establishment has engendered a healthy and persistent distrust among Black communities.
The absence of treatment, thus, contributes to criminalization; yet, criminalization, leads to a lack of attention to mental health issues. Marshall, who has had his share of off-the-field troubles, has been vilified by the media and the public at large, demonstrating how stereotypes and white racial frames imagined him (and other African American fighting mental illness) not as someone who was sick but as a sick individual. His experiences reflect a systemic failure to address mental health within the African American community; it reflects the power of white racial framing and the tendency to criminalize and pathologize rather than treat the symptoms of mental illness. While reflecting the ways in which mental illness poses a threat to hegemonic definitions of manhood, the failure to sufficiently address mental health issues within the African American community illustrates the ways in which criminalization of the black body reconstitutes treatable symptoms as justification for incarceration. To understand criminalization is to understand the failure to treatment mental illness within the African American community
Here are some facts to consider
African Americans constitute over 25 percent of those in need of mental health care
Since 1980, suicide rates among African Americans has increased 200 percent
Rates of depression among black women are 50 percent higher than those of white women
25% of African Americans live without health insurance
35% male prisoners have Borderline Personality Disorder
25% of incarcerated women have been diagnosed with BPD
10% of people who suffer from BPD commit suicide
Blacks are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than with other mood disorders, even when the symptoms point to a mood disorder (whites more likely to be diagnosed with mood disorder when symptoms mirror schizophrenia)
Blacks are less likely to be given anti-depressant medications
Blacks are least likely group to receive therapy
Only 1:3 African Americans who need mental health treatment or care receive it
African Americans constitute only 2 percent of the nation’s psychologists and psychiatrists
According Dr. Regina Benjamin, mental illness continues to plague the African American community in disproportionate rates: “Mental health problems are particularly widespread in the African-American community,” noted the U.S. Surgeon General. “In 2004, nearly 12 percent of African Americans ages 18-25 reported serious psychological distress in the past year. Overall, only one-third of Americans with a mental illness or a mental health problem receive care and the percentage of African Americans receiving services (nearly 7 percent) is half that of non-Hispanic whites.”
Recognizing this problem and the many issues at work, it is important to highlight the courageous activism undertaken by Marshall, Williams, and Artest, all of whom have not only pushed back against the stigmas and fears associated with mental illness, especially as it relates to manhood, but whose public pronouncements have challenged hegemonic stereotypes and narratives that tend to criminalize the black body. Their resistance elucidates the consequences of American racism in contributing to mental health problems all while contributing to a systematic erasure of these problems from public discourse and policy. Marshall, like Williams and Artest, made clear that he is neither a criminal nor a bad person (a common narrative from the press and fans) but someone who is sick, someone who has gotten treatment, and someone who has long needed support rather than demonization. He, like so many African Americans erased from public consciousness, just needed help. Racism so often prevents this from happening. So next some media pundit denounces today’s (black) athletes for reticence and political cowardice, remember Marshall, Williams and Artest, all of whom took a stand against inequality in the treatment of mental health problems.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.
