Dialogue
Black Religion and Mental Health
Symposium Addresses Mental Health Silences and Disparities
By Ahmad Greene-Hayes
On February 29-March 1, 2024, the “Black Religion and Mental Health Symposium” was held at Harvard Divinity School. George Aumoithe of the Departments of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University and I proposed this interdisciplinary two-day symposium and received funding for it from the Harvard Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative.
We proposed this gathering in response to the violent murder of Jordan Neely on May 1, 2023, and in the wake of incessant threats on Black people’s lives. Jordan Neely was an unhoused Black man who was strangled to death by Daniel Penny, a white vigilante. Neely’s death, like the deaths of so many Black people across the globe, was recorded and circulated across the Internet. Neely, who struggled with mental health challenges, poverty, and houselessness, was deemed unworthy and his predicament a site for spectacle on a NYC subway train as onlookers recorded but did not intervene to save his Black life.
Whether it be the everyday reality of anti-black racism, the epigenetic memory of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or other biological, social, and political factors, many Black people like Neely live with depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders. Like our enslaved ancestors who lived in disabled bodies because of the brutal whip of the slave master and the planter class, many people of African descent also navigate mental disabilities in a world that actively shames the Black and disabled. In response to this reality, Black religious spaces, especially Black Protestant churches, have often been situated as havens and sanctuaries to survive the pressures of living while Black in America.
Despite this historical reality, it is also true that Black religious spaces struggle to discuss mental health awareness openly and transparently, due to what Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has described as “the politics of respectability.” Historian Darlene Clark Hine argues that the silence around mental health resulted from Black people having to safeguard themselves against white supremacist violence, in which Black women, in particular, “as a rule, developed and adhered to a cult of secrecy, a culture of dissemblance, to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives.” Indeed, when it comes to matters of the mind, brain, and social and religious behaviors, Black people are often reluctant to disclose the inner aspects of their mental health.
The long history of this silence’s impact on Mind Brain and Behavior fields was discussed during the symposium. Due to the expressive nature of many Africana esoteric and religious practices throughout the diaspora, many state entities, ranging from the police to government employed social scientists and psychiatrists, have historically employed pseudoscientific, racist ideologies to pathologize Black religious practitioners, deeming them mentally unfit and often institutionalizing them in “insane asylums” and other state penitentiaries.
Judith Weisenfeld, who delivered the opening keynote address, examines this troubled history in her forthcoming book on how the field of psychiatry developed in large part due to the subjugation of African Americans in the post-slavery period. Other distinguished panelists delved into the mental health crisis within Black communities, highlighting the role of religious and spiritual practices in coping and resilience, and focusing on innovative strategies and community-based approaches to address mental health disparities, emphasizing the importance of culturally sensitive mental health care. The symposium provided a platform for meaningful dialogue and proposed actionable solutions to improve mental health outcomes for Black individuals and communities.
How Can Black Religious Spaces Enhance Mental Health Outcomes?
By Marla F. Frederick
It is my pleasure to welcome you all to this weekend symposium on Black Religion and Mental Health. Thank you for joining us, both in person and those of you who are online. Before we begin the formal program, I’d like to acknowledge the professors, Ahmad Greene-Hayes and George Aumoithe, who proposed this interdisciplinary symposium integrating mind brain and behavior insights into the exploration of Black religious practices and their impact on mental health.
As you will see over the next two days, Ahmad and George have brought together a stunning array of experts across many fields, including African-American studies, civics, history, psychiatry, public health, and religious studies with a focus on understanding the neurobiological and psycho-behavioral dynamics contributing to mental health stigmatization within Black communities.
Some may wonder what religion has to do with neurobiology and the need for mental health support. To that, I say: you are absolutely in the right place at the right time. Throughout the symposium, the following question will be explored, how can Black religious spaces enhance mental health outcomes considering the dual role of these spaces as both sanctuaries and potential impediments to open discourse?
In my own research with religion and inequality, a topic that I spent more than a year exploring as president of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in 2021, the many multifaceted intersections of religion with our lives came into clearer focus. As we wrestled with the intersections of race and class and religion, it was clear that religion often plays a significant role in people’s lives, from our most private moments to the grandest of public scales.
To reiterate a point that I made with AAR, religion can aid and abet just as it disrupts and averts. It can act as both a wound and a salve, a virus, if you will, and a vaccine. And no less so when we think about the intersections between religion and mental health, and we as scholars and supporters of scholarly work are called upon to make sense of it all to help disaggregate the parts into a meaningful and coherent whole.
To foster excellence in the academic study of religion and enhance the public understanding of religion and its many intersections with our daily life is a lofty charge, indeed, but ever more needed in these particular times. As higher education faces division and conflict and public scrutiny, I want to the deep importance of the work that we do here at Harvard Divinity School.
We are a community that stands on three pillars—academics, ministry, and religion and public Life. And while we study intently the nature of religious conflict, whether it is the scriptural texts and interpretations that give rise to it, or the historical nature of it, we also hold in tension the reality that religion has been and can be a powerful force for good in the world.
I truly thank each of you, faculty, staff, alumni, students, and friends for your commitment to the teaching and learning that happens here at Harvard Divinity School and around the globe with the vital connections you all make near and far. One last note of appreciation before we welcome Dr. Judith Weisenfeld, a good friend and an extraordinary scholar, to the stage for her keynote address.
This symposium came to fruition, in large part, thanks to our organizers, Ahmad Greene-Hayes and George Aumoithe, who exemplify what it means to amplify teaching and learning through connections that defy academic and geographic boundaries.
Thank you both for creating a forum for colleagues from across Harvard and across the United States to delve into critical discussions about Black religion and mental health.
Exploring Structures of Care
By George Aumoithe
I’m Dr. George Aumoithe. I am an assistant professor of History and African American Studies in the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. First of all, I’d really like to thank the Mind Brain and Behavior Institute for allowing Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes and I to co-convene across two schools this really important interdisciplinary conversation that I think is also timely and very important for us to hold.
I want to provide a little bit of framing around the professional context for our convening today. According to the Association of Black Psychologists, of 1.2 million behavioral health providers in the US in 2020 nationally, 4% of psychologists, 2% of psychiatrists, 7% of marriage and family counselors, 11% of professional counselors, and 22% of social workers are Black.
While these ratios represent a numerical improvement from the early twentieth century—the state of Black mental health representation then according to scholars like Elizabeth Lunbeck and our very own Martin Summers, who have identified only a handful of professional psychologists and psychiatrists providing care in the immediate post-war period—Black people remain underrepresented in the highest echelons of professional care.
We also need to think about certain lingering issues such as the mistreatment of patients in psychiatric wards, or the violence emanating out of encounters with police as first responders, or even the violence emerging from vigilante actors who intervene when someone is in distress as illustrated by the tragic killing of Jordan Neely by former Marine Daniel Penny after Penny placed Neely in an extended chokehold on a New York City subway.
Whether the historically poor representation of Black people in mental health professions or understanding Black people’s indigenous mental health practices and how they intersect with our spiritual practices, our symposium promises to deepen our historical and practical knowledge.
Today, we begin with Dr. Judith Weisenfeld’s research on the racialization of religious excitement and American psychiatry. Tomorrow, we hear from historians, religious, scholars, community organizers, policy experts, and mental health practitioners who will shed light on the intersection of Black religious communities and the acceptance of and stigma against mental health care.
In our dialogue, one question we might ponder as a group is: How do we seize the opportunities inherent to open dialogue and avoid the pitfalls of historic distrust between religious and mental health institutions? Throughout tonight’s talk and tomorrow’s plenary gathering, I look forward to exploring institutional accountability and identifying non-institutional practices and solutions.
But I also hope we can explore the structure around care, structures that include housing, education, and treatment. Without an awareness of this overarching structure within our discussion of the intersection between religion and mental health access, we leave with a potentially incomplete picture of the social problems that confront us.
Ahmad Greene-Hayes is Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Advanced Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
George Aumoithe is assistant professor of History and of African and African American Studies in the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
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