The Vision | Beyond the surface

Reading between the lines of mental wellness

By The Vision and Stephanie Jideama 10/21/14 10:01pm

"Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity."—Chimamanda Adichie

As I sat in class, I stared at a chart presenting comparative depression rates across countries. My eyes instantly went to my paren ts’ country, Nigeria, whose depression prevalence was 5.2 percent . In an attempt to explain this number, a student theorized that “maybe people are just really happy over there.” I shook my head and explained that while mental health is stigmatized worldwide, it is something that no one dares to openly discuss in my culture. Mental health does not exist for us.

I had trouble wrapping my mind around how my experience on campus might be different depending on my identity. I often think about what it means to have my body present on campus. As a woman, I don’t always feel safe walking home late at night, as I have been a target of street harassment. As a person of color, I always wonder how others perceive my existence within the campus space. I have been questioned for my presence, mistaken for not being a Penn student, as well as the object of blame for “unfairly being here only because of affirmative action.” And in the context of my academic privilege, I wonder how my experience in a black body might be drastically different if I didn’t carry a PennCard at all.

With increasing attention towards campus mental health, students have come together to grieve and mobilize. The mental health conversation is not an easy one. And while it’s difficult to understand every single person’s narrative, the current conversation has been fairly surface-level for some: Penn’s cutthroat culture, Pennface, etc.

No one doubts the validity of these concerns. However, this aspect of the conversation is simpler to relate to for many students, hence why it has monopolized the conversation. What is not as easy to discuss? Race, gender, sexuality, religion, ableism, culture, socioeconomic status, microaggressions, intersectionality, amongst countless other variables. These nuanced paradigms are essential for many to have a holistic conversation on their mental health. This inspired me to ask a simple yet daunting question: What does mental health mean to you?

There are countless organizations on campus dedicated to promoting mental wellness. But many of these organizations don’t deeply explore the ways in which intersectionality may affect students’ mental health. In attempting to appeal to as many people as possible, organizations such as the Mental Health Initiative, Active Minds and Cogwell can consequently only devote so much time to this specific focus within mental health culture.

This is not to say that what they do is not important — in fact, it is crucial to starting the conversation and promoting openness and dialogue. And while these organizations are constantly making attempts to further incorporate these nuances, this leaves it up to us as a student body to further the conversation and take it to a level where we can regularly talk about microaggressions, what it means to feel othered and also what it means to celebrate the very things that make our narratives unique on campus.

Motivated by this void in our mental health discussion, I founded the Penn Initiative for Minority Mental Health in the fall of 2013, an organization that strives to integrate Penn’s minority and underrepresented populations into the conversation of campus mental health. Our intent is to create a sustainable safe space to discuss the ways in which intersectionality may affect students’ mental health.

In collaboration with various cultural resources and organizations, PIMMH was launched as a support forum for students of all backgrounds to explore cultural considerations and implications to the mental health approach. The goal is simple. I hope that every student who stumbles upon our organization feels empowered by our message: My mental health mat ters.

Stephanie Jideama is a College senior studying health and societies. Her email address is sjideama@sas.upenn.edu. “The Vision” is a column for black voices that appears every Wednesday.

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