The Culture of Stigma Surrounding Depression in the African American Family and Community

Abstract

This article explores the crisis of depression in post-modern America through the contextualized lens of the African American experience. In view of the pervasive societal realities of race, class, and gender oppression, the article begins by identifying the American trans-Atlantic slave trade as an historical trauma and cultural factor for depression among (enslaved and freed) Africans and persons of African descent. It highlights the cultural stigmatization of depression as a prevailing challenge facing African Americans today. The author concludes the article by drawing from a communal–contextual model of Black pastoral theology to offer both the Black pastor and the ‘extended family’ network of the African American congregation as vital resources in countering the effects of the cultural stigmatization of depression.

Keywords:

• depression
• collective memory
• historical trauma
• cultural stigmatization
• societal oppression
• counseling African Americans
• stress

Notes

1 Limited research exists that gives recognition to the degree of physiological trauma inflicted upon the slave body as a result of corporeal punishment upon (enslaved and freed) Africans during slavery. ‘While slaveholders may not have been explicit in their descriptions of discipline and its effects on slave bodies, corporeal punishment was a significant element of the culture of mastery’ (Boster, 2013, pp. 47–48).

2 The term ‘slavocracy’ is used to describe the commerce and/or industry of slavery.

3 In-depth discussion continues around the actual number of African slaves traded–sold/stolen–captured–resold in the American trans-Atlantic slave trade industry. ‘Considering the great many who were killed while resisting capture in Africa, those who died during the transatlantic passage, and the millions successfully brought to the Americas, the aggregate number of victims approaches staggering proportions. After decades of debate over the number of Africans carried to the New World as slaves during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, an extensive digital database compiled under historian David Eltis, concludes approximately 12.5 million slaves were transported’ (Franklin & Higginbotham, 2011, p. 35).

4 There is scant literature available that clearly distinguishes between those Africans who were traded or sold by other Africans, those Africans who escaped enslavement in Africa, and those Africans who were stolen and/or captured by Europeans unbeknownst to African rulers/traders. I use the acronym ‘TSCR’ as a means of incorporating the aforementioned to reflect African slaves who were either (T) traded, (S) sold/stolen, (C) captured and/or (R) resold in the complex system of the transatlantic slave trade (or slavocracy) in America.

5 This passage refers to the quintessential blood-guiltiness on Cain's hands, when God challenges him to be forthright regarding his treatment of his brother Abel (Genesis 4:10).

6 The inhumanity of slavocracy demanded that (enslaved and freed) Africans formulate a collective identification that countered the negative imagery postulated by whites (i.e., the bogus image of the happy, passive, simple-minded slave, etc.). Paulo Freire contends that those who experience oppression can only achieve liberation through actively engaging in or continually striving towards it (Freire, 2000, p. 45).

7 Luke 17:19, American King James Version.