S1 Episode 2: Lived Experience Matters

Episode 2 features Victor's take on equity, as it's learned, seen and socialized. He discusses his own childhood as the son of a North Carolina pastor and the challenges of growing up in a faith-based community in rural NC. Victor closes this take with how the pandemic and social media have changed the conversations around mental health.

Thanks for listening! Get more of our addiction medicine-related content and learn about the work we do with Service Members, Veterans, and Their Families at our YouTube Page - youtube.com/govinst.

Transcript

"When I look at how I came to where I am now.. and I am one of those people who believes that we are, where we are today is a combination of two things. It is a combination of our disposition.. which is our makeup. Some people are more introverted, some are more extroverted. Some people are more high strung than others so all of those things – those personality traits factor into who we are. The other part of it though is lived experience. It’s everything that we have learned, everything that we have seen everything we have been socialized to see.

So, when I was growing up in Eastern North Carolina, rural North Carolina, very rural North Carolina, son of a preacher, we never talked about suicide as being issue that impacted black people. In fact, it was the opposite. I was told that we didn’t die by suicide. It was a white people problem. It wasn’t a black people problem. My father, pastor for 48 years, I grew up socialized in the church, socialized also to see and to believe that the church was a gateway to the black community. So, what was important in the Black community was talked about in church, and the church was also the vehicle to let the external community know what was important to the Black community. But in all the 48 years my father pastored, and this is no aspersion on him or any of his colleagues but I never heard my father or any of his peers talk about mental health in the church. So everything I learned told me it was not an issue for us to be concerned about. We also grew up, as Black people hearing, over and over, that what happens in this house stays in this house. You don’t talk about anything that happens in our community outside the community. You don’t talk to the police, you don’t show signs of weakness and if you experience depression or anxiety, that’s a sign of moral or spiritual weakness, which is not permissible. I was told that as Black people we survived slavery, we can survive anything. Which meant I didn’t have the right to be depressed. I didn’t have the right to experience anxiety. All of those things play into the way that we normalize and socialize the conversation. And I believe that part of the reason that we see the rise in suicide rates in Black and brown communities is that we have not created avenues to talk about those challenges. We have not given people permission to talk about those challenges. And one of the challenges too with the faith based community is that, I know from growing up that in the African American church, it is also very much a male dominated environment and where men don’t want to talk about things, they don’t get talked about. And men were not permitted to talk about being vulnerable. Men were not permitted to talk about things that could be characterized as weakness. All of that has culminated into this code of silence around suicide and around mental health challenges. Now I think that we are seeing the tide change in that area. I think in part, for one, I do believe that over the past year, if anything good has come of this pandemic, it has I think made it easier to talk about mental health challenges because I think many people are better able to see themselves on the behavioral health spectrum in ways they had not been able to before. They never knew before how close they could be to anxiety. How close they could be to depression. I think those conversations have opened up. But I think the other thing we’ve seen over the past few years is we’ve seen athletes talk about their mental health challenges. We’ve seen celebrities talk about their mental health challenges. And I think that resonates with young people. I think the other thing is that, social media, for all of it’s flaws, it does permit people to connect. So you’re able to connect with other people who are experiencing the same challenges that you are. And I think that changes the way we have a lot of those conversations around mental health and mental wellness. I go back to my experience growing up in the church, that was where I was socialized. Kids today are not socialized in the church. They’re socialized in conversations with people who may live in another country. So they’re able to talk more about the challenges that they’re facing and normalize their conversation.

We have seen nationally, statistics say we’ve seen about a threefold increase in reports of anxiety and depression. We’ve also seen a significant increase in opioid deaths. Now that’s an interesting subject for black and brown people. Because when black and brown people talk about the opiate crisis, of course it sparks conversation about when it was crack it was criminal and now that it’s affecting white people, it’s a disease, and we have all these resources available for it. But when I think about all of this in totality and how it’s affected black and brown people, you still can’t factor that out. Over the past year, we have seen disproportionately bad outcomes of black and brown people at the hands of law enforcement. And I think we all have a different lens. I often talk about people’s perspectives and perspectives are different, in part, based on your life experience. Based on my life experience, when I see George Floyd, I see myself. I see that it could have just as easily been me. When I see Ahmaud Arbery, I have a 28-year-old son. I see my son. And so I think it’s different if you’re seeing it through the lens of someone outside the community versus a person inside the community. Because one thing I think about in terms of how we personalize things is that we all think in terms of our community and I think our community changes depending on the situation or circumstance. You have law enforcement community. You have the medical community. You have the African American community. And I think over the past year, for black and brown people and for black people in particular, I think we have been more likely to focus on how things impact Black community. Because we’ve had to see things through that lens and I have had to see things through the lens of a Black man. How does this impact me as a Black man? And so when I think of all those things, I think about how did the pandemic impact Black and brown people? Disproportionately bad outcomes. How did encounters with law enforcement impact black and brown people? Disproportionately bad outcomes. How does anxiety and depression and suicide impact black and brown people? Statistics are showing disproportionately bad outcomes. But where is our focus? Our focus is on opiates, and that’s admirable. We need to focus on opiates. But we can’t deny the fact that a lot of Black and brown people are still dying from alcoholism. We have Black and brown people that are still addicted to crack cocaine. We have black and brown people that are still serving decade and double decade long sentences for marijuana charges. So, again, if I look at all those things through the lens of a Black man, I again, see a disproportionately bad outcome. And all of that, over time, it impacts your mental wellness."