Maybe it would be too convenient to label the nationwide protests over police killings, racism, and social injustice as panic attacks. Still, it is clear our country is suffering from a collective claustrophobia that has intensified within the past year and brought us to a flashpoint. Citizens and police alike feel closed in; responses — whether the reckless and/or gratuitous use of force and weaponry, or the seemingly random and counterintuitive destruction of property and businesses — are marked by panic, irrationality, and fear.

I’m not a psychologist; I’m a mental health advocate whose experience has afforded me a certain degree of visibility. (Or notoriety, depending on which NBA executive you ask, but that’s a story for another day.) But as someone who also deals with anxiety disorder every day, I know all about panic attacks and the inability to breathe. As a black male, I’m particularly attuned to that same feeling of being closed in and smothered — the African American community remains widely underserved by our vast national resources, viewed by a significant portion of our population as undeserving of basic regard.

I know how counterproductive it is to lack a basic protocol when it comes to an employee’s psychological well-being. My quest to establish a clear protocol in the NBA got me labeled as everything from a Prima donna to a locker room problem, and I suspect it has left me unofficially blackballed from the league despite my being a first-round draft pick. In that way, I’m a smaller metaphor for societal discourse around mental health: rather than deal with the issue, people in positions of authority would rather ignore it until it goes away.

Only, it won’t.

That problem isn’t restricted to team owners and CEOs, by any means. When it comes to issues of mental illness and mental health — whether in the most impoverished and traumatized communities, or even within the departments that employ those who police those streets — discussing fear, anxiety, stress and depression remains stigmatized. The attitude is we’d rather not know.

Why? Because mental health is an issue that requires and amplifies our individual and collective responsibility to ourselves and others. It’s a mirror that reflects who we really are — yet we keep running from our reflections.

We can debate cause and effect, but the facts allow for minimal wiggle room: our most downtrodden communities are entrenched in a cycle of social dysfunction; our police employ brutal and sometimes deadly tactics in their interactions with these communities; and within the debate about who and what is right or wrong, the most significant aspect of the discussion is — as usual — absent. Our culture inspires and subsequently neglects serious mental illness in too many of its citizens. We can no longer afford to perpetuate this problem by stubbornly refusing to address it.

As a conscientious citizen of this great nation, I have sympathy for our police. Their job is dangerous and often thankless, and many of them are overworked and underpaid in relation to the vital function they serve in our communities. Officers like Darren Wilson are humans; susceptible to the same stresses, fears, and other mental issues as any of us. Given the combination of their fallibility and the dangers of their jobs, it’s unfathomable that we still lack universal policies on psychological evaluations for police officers. It says something frightening about our culture that we’d rather increase the scope and sophistication of police weaponry than take steps that ensure the health of both police and those they serve.

We’ve chosen fear over understanding, antagonism over sympathy, and brute force over humane concern.

These choices have dire consequences. It is obvious that some of our police officers now view themselves as soldiers rather than peacekeepers — a grave consequence of the increasing militarization of the police. The danger of this view — one that transforms communities into combat zones and engenders in police a sense of at-all-cost self-preservation rather than de-escalation — is that there’s an ever-increasing breakdown in trust and communication between police and citizens. Both sides have become inhuman in the eyes of the other, and no productive, progressive dialogue can exist within such a dynamic.

There aren’t easy answers to issues of criminality, cultural and financial poverty, and police brutality, but without an approach grounded in the acknowledgment and treatment of mental illness, progress will be limited.