But efforts are underway to promote a different message: that it’s healthy and liberating for Black young people to open up about their struggles.

In East Orange, New Jersey, the predominantly Black city where Yanie lives, city officials made mental health the focus of a summer youth-employment program, which resulted in the student-led forum. The school district has embraced social-emotional learning to help students explore their inner lives. And last school year it piloted a peer-mentoring program where high schoolers talked to middle school students about understanding their anger and finding joy.

Such efforts are partly a pragmatic response to mental health staff shortages hobbling high-needs school districts like East Orange, where 83% of students are Black and just over half come from low-income households. But officials also want to establish new norms so that Black students, who are about half as likely as their white peers to receive mental health care, feel empowered to speak up and seek help.

“In our community, it’s a stigma that comes with that,” said Jamila Davis, an activist and educator based at Seton Hall University who helps facilitate the youth mental health programs in East Orange. “But if you see everybody around you is feeling similar things, you feel like you’re not alone and it’s OK.”

Eventually, the friend asked again, and Yanie reluctantly agreed to join an on-stage discussion at the mental health forum last August.

In an auditorium filled mostly with Black teens, her peers spoke about the psychic strain of watching videos of police brutalizing Black people, of losing loved ones to gun violence, of being mocked by classmates or brushed off by parents after sharing their struggles. Some recalled cutting themselves, binge eating, and staying in psychiatric hospitals.

One young woman explained how, for Black and Brown students, racism compounds the pain of adolescence.

“If people see that they’re not accepted in society,” she said, “how can you accept yourself?”

Young people’s ailing mental health is “the defining public health crisis of our time,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently declared. But too often the crisis’ causes and solutions are treated as universal, with race either ignored or white children’s experiences presented as the norm, said Amanda Calhoun, a psychiatry resident at Yale University.

Read the full article about peer mentoring for Black students by Patrick Wall at Chalkbeat.