Throughout the past few years, mental health within the Black community has come to the forefront of conversations and has raised many concerns for our Black youth. Mental Health America has reported that Black teenagers are more likely to attempt suicide than their white counterparts and acquaintances and that Blacks of all ages are more likely to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of their increased exposure to death and violence. Affirming YOUth Foundation has started a twelve-week after school program called SEEDS with the hope of helping inner-city youth with dealing with and controlling their emotions.
When interviewed by The Miami Time, Jonathan Spikes, whom is the executive director of the Affirming YOUth Foundation, speaks on the goals of the program, which is to partner with the youth. Spikes says, “One thing about our program is that we don’t have all the answers…And so instead of telling them what to do, we create a partnership who then makes plans, and we meet them where they are.” Spikes believes it is important for our youth to learn how to cope with the trauma that they may face, which is something he has personal experience on while growing up in Liberty City. At six years old, Spikes’ fourteen-year-old brother was shot in the knee while taking out the trash. When Spikes was twenty-one, his twenty-eight-year-old brother was shot and murdered on Northwest 68 Terrace and 15 Avenue. “It has a big impact because when those things happened to me and going through those traumas, we didn’t talk about it; we acted like it didn’t exist,” Spikes said.
So many of our Black and brown teens are unknowingly being exposed to depression, anxiety, PTSD and so many more mental disorders, and as kids whose families do not act positively when discussing mental illnesses, they decide to shut down and let themselves deal with it on their own and on their own terms, causing for things to build up and cause for unnecessary stress. The SEEDS program hopes to work with our teens in these intercity neighborhoods and help them with figuring out and controlling their emotions, and hopefully help those who are contemplating suicide that they have other choices.
The Washington Post addressed a few of the same issues that the Affirming YOUth Foundation was concerned about. Suicide is the largest leading cause of death for older children and adolescents in the United States. Bridge, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at the Columbus hospital, says, “We can’t assume any longer that suicide rates are uniformly higher in white individuals than black…There is this age-related disparity, and now we have to understand the underlying reasons. …Most of the previous research has largely concerned white suicide. So we don’t even know if the same risk and protective factors apply to black youth.” We’ve noticed a change in our children, especially among the young children. Although suicide is rare among your children, we have seen so many young black children committing suicide due to bullying. Bridge also says, “No one talks about that with them. We tend to put them in silos, and don’t discuss these things because we think it’s too traumatic…Instead there must be a slow and steady flow of communication.”
Known risk factors for suicide¬–such as depression, previous suicide attempts, alcohol and substance use and family history of suicide– “are likely to be risk factors across the board,” says Bridge. Little is known about social risk factors that might underlie the racial disparity seen in younger kids, such as feeling unsafe playing outside, having little to no access to healthcare or having lost an older sibling to violence, as discussed earlier.
The SEEDS program is a new addition to Affirming YOUth Foundation’s other services. It has implemented a conflict resolution program, a grieving program and has engaged youth in the arts through a stage play. According to their website, the foundation has worked with seventeen schools and served two-hundred-and-thirty youth in 2017. SEEDS, or Social Emotional Enhance and Development for Success, aims to work with students to deal with their emotional trauma and increase social and academic success. During the twelve weeks of the program, students will be able to take advantage of the foundation’s computer lab, get academic homework assistance and receive counseling services. There are up to one-hundred students who can participate in the program at a time, and they will be switched out every twelve weeks.
Jonathan Spikes says Affirming YOUth Foundation is working with the Miami-Dade County Public Schools System’s Together for Children initiative to select students for the program. Students who show any early warning indicators, which may include fighting in school, getting involved with the police and receiving a high amount of absences, may receive a referral from their school to participate in the program.
Joyce Davis, licensed clinical social worker and school counselor at Miami-Dade County Public Schools, helped together for SEEDS. Davis said when creating the program, she wanted to consider the cultural relevancy of it because teens, specifically in the inner city, face issues that teens from other communities do not face. “In our community, we have an issue with teen violence, gun violence in particular. That’s not an issue for all teens, but in our community, it’s a relevant issue…We want to have concepts that our kids can relate to. A thirteen-year-old child that lives in the inner city is not the same as a thirteen-year-old that lives in a rural environment, so we have to take that into consideration.” This helps many students, especially our black and brown students. Many of our lower minority students do not have the resources to take care of their mental health, whether it be due to them not having healthcare, not having healthcare that covers therapy, or parents that are not supporting of mental health.