Monday is Black Mental Health Day in Toronto – the first of a planned annual conversation about the negative impact of racism on the mental health of Black Torontonians.

That such a campaign is necessary is a cup of cold water to many faces, a kick in the gut to others. For the city’s 400,000 Black people, it’s a double-edged sword. Some are embarrassed. Others are resentful. Some say it smacks of victimhood.

But others relish the opportunity to confront a monstrous evil that has its deadly, debilitating grip on too many Black lives.

The need is irrefutable. Here’s why:

As humans we seem to be getting crazier by the day. The fault lines are numerous. Increasingly, the victims look like the persons who share our mirror. And it costs the local economy an estimated $13 billion a year from people missing work.

Black people, because of their resilience and heroic survival instincts, have endured tremendous trauma that would have wiped out lesser men and women. But the trauma, buried just below the skin, is erupting into haunting manifestations that demands our attention.

Black people are the only ones brought to North and South America and the Caribbean in chains, as slaves. And 400 years later, they still face prejudice, discrimination and remnants of a dehumanization and degradation that is being fingered as the cause of persistent trauma.

Parts of the GTA’s Black population are undergoing a 60 per cent increase in serious mental health problems like psychosis.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada reports that African and Caribbean Canadians were more exposed to the factors that lead to poor mental health: lower education, insufficient housing, greater unemployment and poverty, plus higher levels of criminalization.

The City of Toronto, in an official news release in January, acknowledged that “Anti-Black racism is a historic, pervasive and systematic issue in Toronto.”

Toronto went further: “Experiencing systemic discrimination and micro-aggressions are social stressors that increase the risk of negative physical and mental health including anxiety, depression, suicide or suicidal thoughts, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, high blood pressure and premature mortality.” In short, the city news release said, racism is killing Black people and driving them mad.

The City of Ottawa has followed Toronto’s lead, declaring Monday as Black Mental Health Day.

The NDP caucus plans to introduce a bill at Queen’s Park, seeking to proclaim the day across Ontario, the province with the largest number of Black citizens.

Once our official institutions acknowledge the problem, it is reasonable to expect them to act on recommendations for change. This strengthens the hands of the many groups and individuals engaged in this advocacy.

Advocacy is needed because the reasons for the ill-health are pervasive. Black people in Toronto are still being carded, streamed into non-academic courses, profiled by police and other institutions.

Parents of Black boys still must caution their sons to drive safely – and also to be aware of the deadly possibility of Driving While Black. How can one sleep well at night with that fear and stress hanging permanently over one’s head? “There is a doggedness in our DNA that I wouldn’t trade,” my friend Sharon McLeod said this week. But, oh, it’s a heavy load.

Reports show Black people’s introduction to the mental health supports system is irregular, unhelpful, and prone to result in worse outcomes than the white population. The expected norm is: referral from your family doctor; link to the supports; careful engagement and healing. For too many Blacks, the first contact follows an episode that ends with the police being called. Healing is a difficult proposition in the belly of the criminal justice system.

Black people are more likely to be given extreme labels when in care. They are more often put in restraints and given heavier and stronger doses of anti-psychotic drugs.

There are too many Black kids in the care of Children’s Aid, too many Black children suspended from schools, too few Black graduates in science and engineering, and of the many Black students in behavioural sciences, too few hold position of authority to affect how Black citizens navigate the mental health system.

The above daily drum beat cannot lead to a healthy life. It does not.

Dr. Kwame McKenzie, CEO of the Wellesley Institute and professor of psychiatry at U of T, broke it down adroitly in his op-ed piece in the Star last month.

“Racism makes the lives of the Black population worse than others and increases the rates of psychosis and depression by 200 to 300 per cent,” he wrote. “Stress has been identified as one cause. And racism-related stress is more impactful than other forms. Anyone who does not get a promotion will feel stressed. But the stress is greater if you think it is because of discrimination and is increased further if you believe there is nothing you can do about it.”

After 400 years of prejudice, discrimination and daily trauma, it is reasonable to expect Black people need a day for their mental health.

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It’s not a time for white voyeurism – though that is an offshoot – but a time for Black healing and repair.

“It’s a cry for help, a call for action,” says Liben Gebremikael, executive director of Taibu Community Health Centre.

And the start of something — a commitment to the long arduous dismantling of an entrenched system that first took Black bodies and, now, is claiming their minds.