Summit to examine stigma around mental health in Black community

Marissa Player-Montgomery was sexually assaulted at age 14, she said by phone Thursday. Her Seventh-day Adventist community frowned on abortion, and she had the resulting child, she said, but the violation left her traumatized, scared of everybody around her — and she lacked the tools to process what had happened.

In an African-American family with a strict religion, it just wasn’t something you brought up, she said.

She acted out, became angry and erratic, quick to cuss out the people around her.

“I was not a nice person,” she said. “And then I was going to be made to be a mommy.”

Poverty and racism affect African-Americans in ways seen and unseen, and studies and individual accounts show how the mental health effects, left untreated, run from one generation to the next. This dynamic — and the cultural stigma that keeps people and families from openly discussing it — will be the central subjects at a mental health summit Saturday morning at Orchard Knob Missionary Baptist Church.

The event is organized by First Baptist Cares, a nonprofit arm of First Baptist Church. It will feature panels on mental health in the church amid COVID-19 and in the Black community, said First Baptist Church’s Rev. William Terry Ladd III by phone Wednesday.

Player-Montgomery, now the Southeast regional coordinator for the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, consults with First Baptist Cares and will be among the panelists Saturday.

The relationship between church and mental health can be complicated, but as pastor, Ladd has sought to connect the two realms.

About five years ago First Baptist Church started offering clinical mental health counseling to people in the congregation, he said. They expanded the program last year, when First Baptist Cares applied for and received $250,000 to offer counseling services to people affected by COVID-19 or other sorts of trauma.

This money came from the pot of more than $30 million the city of Chattanooga received in American Rescue Plan funding, approved by Democrats in Congress and distributed by the city to nonprofits and other area groups during the summer of 2022.

That funding means qualifying community members and their families may receive 10 free counseling sessions, Ladd said.

The mental health summit is partly intended to spread the word. The point, through

panels and a yoga and breathing exercise session, is to discuss the causes and effects of poor mental health in the Black community, the stigma and other factors that can keep people from getting necessary help — and to explore possible solutions.

Black people can be leery of a medical profession with a checkered history in the community, and some churches discourage clinical mental health counseling, promoting Bible-based therapy instead. Ladd sees great value in Biblical counseling — he himself provides it — but feels it should not come at the expense of clinical counseling. Plus he feels the distinction is not necessarily so clear.

“There’s a classic clinical counseling session done by Jesus in Luke 8: 26-33,” he said.

Religious antipathy to mental health counseling is by no means universal. Ladd himself enacted advice he got in seminary to keep a personal exercise and counseling regime. For about 10 years of his 14 years as pastor at First Baptist Church, he’s been in counseling himself, he said. It has helped him understand issues from his childhood, he said, and to become a better counselor to others.

Black families often don’t talk about family issues, he said.

“Without adequate mental health counseling and services,” he said, “that trauma from one generation to another is passed on.”

Black children are about three times more likely than white children to live in poverty, according to the Columbia Population Research Center. And even as in recent decades poverty rates have declined among every racial group, Black poverty is far more likely to span several generations than it is in the case of white families.

“Three generations of poverty is almost uniquely a Black experience,” the left-leaning Brookings Institution and rightleaning American Enterprise Institute found in a joint study.

This experience — of never having enough — traumatizes young minds, and it’s compounded by racism, and the fear one might feel because of how they look, Player-Montgomery said.

“You’re constantly in a state of toxic stress, and that changes the brain chemistry,” she said.

Such a mind can’t calm down, dwelling in the amygdala, a prehistoric part of the human brain in which people enact their instincts to fight, flight or freeze, she said.

“That’s not a way to live,” she said. “Either you’re going to be stagnant and not do anything — which is the freeze part — or you’re gonna fight.”

And people in this state of mind can’t learn new things, she said.

The part of the brain where much reasoning and judgment happen generally develops late, in a person’s early 20s, she said. But stress and hyper-arousal undermine this development, she said — and the resulting problems get passed on.

Player-Montgomery found herself on this path in her teen years, when she had a child, who, to her, resembled her attacker. She was anxious, depressed, and prone to anger. Eventually her mom — who worked in the medical profession — perceived the need for an intervention, Player-Montgomery said.

“She was able to see that and said, ‘OK no. There’s something here. My baby needs help,’” Player-Montgomery said.

Player-Montgomery said she went into intensive therapy for five years.

She learned to express her fears and slowly began to heal, she said.

“I was able to learn trust again,” she said, “but it took some time.”

She felt more secure and felt she gained the tools to raise a daughter.

“She’s 20 years old, and she’s my everything,” PlayerMontgomery said. “But I had to do the work.”