You Can't Dress Your Way Into Health: What Black People Need to Hear About Mental Health and the Body

At Coleman Public Relations and Consulting Firm, we talk about strategy. We talk about wealth. We talk about building something that outlasts you. But none of that matters if you are not here to see it. And right now, too many of us are not going to be here to see it. Not because of the economy. Not because of the competition. Not because somebody blocked your blessing. Because we are slowly killing ourselves and calling it culture.

Dr. Rheeda Walker's The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health is the book your family needs to read at the dinner table, your pastor needs to reference from the pulpit, and your doctor needs to keep on their desk. It is not a soft book. It is not a feel-good book. It is a tell-the-truth book. And the truth it tells about Black mental health and physical health together is the conversation most of us have been avoiding our entire lives.

We Need to Talk About What We Are Calling Normal

Here is where we need to get direct, and some of you are not going to like it.

We have been trained by family, by community, by culture, to look at a woman who is visibly overweight, chronically tired, short of breath walking up a flight of stairs, and say one of two things. Either she's thick or she's big boned. We dress it up. We celebrate it. We put it on a t-shirt. And while we are busy making excuses for each other, diabetes is winning. Hypertension is winning. Heart disease is winning. And we are losing people we love before their time while telling ourselves they were just built that way.

No. Stop it.

Walker makes it plain in her book. The connection between poor diet, neglected physical health, and mental health is not a coincidence. It is a direct pipeline. When a person is carrying unresolved emotional pain, unprocessed trauma, and chronic stress with no outlet and no support, the body absorbs what the mind cannot release. Binge eating is not always about food. Neglecting doctor visits is not always about being busy. Sometimes it is about feeling like your body does not deserve care because your mind has already decided you are not worth it. That is what untreated depression and anxiety look like when they move into the physical space.

And we have been calling it thickness.

Some of us are eating ourselves to death. Some are spending money we do not have to feel something, chasing the high of a purchase instead of the discipline of an investment. Some are using sex as a substitute for intimacy, connection, and healing. These are not character flaws. They are symptoms of pain that never got a proper address. The method changes but the root is the same. Pain looking for an exit that does not lead anywhere good.

The Traveling Illusion

Here is a theory I want you to sit with. There is a version of travel that is beautiful. Seeing the world. Expanding your mind. Building relationships across borders. That is real and worth pursuing.

But there is another version of travel that is escape dressed up as culture. You are in Cancun, Mombasa, Mykonos, somewhere gorgeous, but your mind is still at home processing the argument you have not had, the grief you have not touched, the relationship that is falling apart, the business you are avoiding, the childhood you have never dealt with. The chairs are outside. The shade is perfect. The water is the color of something you have never seen before. And you are still not there because you were never really present to begin with.

Your home should be your vacation. Not in the sense that you never leave. In the sense that your internal world, your peace, your relationships, your sense of self, should be stable enough that you do not need to flee it. When your home is a place you are running from rather than running to, the destination does not matter. You take yourself with you everywhere you go. And if you have not done the work, you take the pain with you too. I have seen people travel to 30 countries and come back more broken than when they left, because they were not experiencing the world. They were hiding in it.

Real rest is not a plane ticket. Real rest is mental health. And we have been confusing the two for a long time.

The Number Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Let us talk about something that does not make it to the cookout conversation. Black youth suicide.

For generations, the cultural narrative has been that Black people do not do that. That suicide is a white people problem. That our faith, our community, our strength keeps us from going there. That narrative is not just wrong. It is dangerous. And the data says it is actively killing our children.

According to the CDC and peer-reviewed research published in JAMA Network Open (2024), suicide rates among Black youth ages 10 to 19 have increased 54 percent since 2019. In that same window, suicide rates among white youth decreased by 17 percent. For the first time in recorded American history, Black youth suicide rates have surpassed those of their white peers (Lindsey et al., 2024). From 2007 to 2020, the suicide rate among Black youth ages 10 to 17 jumped 144 percent (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2024). Black boys ages 5 to 11 are now more likely than white boys in the same age group to die by suicide (Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, 2023).

Read that again. Five to eleven years old.

This is not a statistic from somewhere far away. This is happening in our neighborhoods, our schools, our churches, and our family group chats.

Now some people will point to Africa and say suicide is not a problem on the continent. And there is a kernel of truth there that deserves honest framing. Historically, suicide rates in many African countries have been lower than in the United States, shaped in part by stronger community structures, extended family systems, and cultural and spiritual protective factors. But the research also shows that suicide in sub-Saharan Africa is underreported, underfunded, and poorly surveilled, with only 0.9 mental health workers per 100,000 people compared to the global average of 9 (WHO, 2025). Some regions of sub-Saharan Africa report suicide rates between 3.2 and 34.6 per 100,000 population, a wide range that reflects how much we simply do not know because the data collection infrastructure does not exist.

The protective factors are real. But the absence of data is not the same as the absence of pain.

The point is this. What we thought protected us in America, the strength, the silence, the faith without action, is clearly not holding. We are converging with a population whose rates are going down while ours go up. That is not a coincidence. That is what happens when pain goes unaddressed for generations.

Being Skinny Is Not a Mental Health Report Card

Now let us go the other direction, because this conversation has to go both ways.

Just because someone is slim does not mean they are well. You can be a size four and be terrified to leave your house. You can have a flat stomach and be consumed by anxiety so severe that social situations feel like physical danger. Walker addresses agoraphobia, the fear of open or public spaces, and the range of anxiety disorders that quietly dismantle Black people's ability to function in the world. These are not conditions that announce themselves with visible symptoms. You cannot look at someone and see their panic attacks. You cannot see their rumination. You cannot see the way they white-knuckle every interaction because the world has taught them that showing vulnerability is the same as showing weakness.

We have a community full of people who look fine on the outside and are falling apart on the inside. We celebrate the outside. We ignore the inside. And we wonder why we keep losing people.

You cannot dress your way into health. A fresh outfit does not lower your cortisol. A new car does not treat your depression. A curated Instagram page does not address the agoraphobia that keeps you from being able to walk into a room full of people without feeling like the walls are closing in. We have mastered the performance of wellness while avoiding the actual work of it.

The Excuse Has Expired

Walker calls something out in her book that stopped me cold. She talks about what she calls low-key suicide, the slow, incremental destruction of your own health through choices that society has normalized in Black communities. Poor nutrition. Substance use. Ignoring chronic illness. Skipping mental health care. These are not just lifestyle choices. They are symptoms. They are expressions of pain that never got a voice. And when pain does not get a voice, it gets a body.

We have given ourselves and each other too many free passes on this. We have used culture as cover for crisis. We have used strength as a synonym for silence. And we have buried too many people who were not sick from something that came out of nowhere. They were sick from something that was never addressed.

Dr. Walker is not asking us to be perfect. She is asking us to be honest. Honest about what we are eating and why. Honest about why we avoid the doctor. Honest about the anxiety we mask with humor and hustle. Honest about the depression we mask with productivity. Honest about the grief we have never processed because we were too busy being strong for everybody else. Honest about whether that flight to somewhere beautiful is a celebration or a retreat from a life we have not yet learned to be present in.

At CPRFIRM, We Take Care of the Whole Thing

We built Coleman Public Relations and Consulting Firm around one principle: we take care of what matters. And what matters is not just your brand, your revenue, your positioning in the market. What matters is you. Your mind. Your body. Your ability to actually be present for the life you are working this hard to build.

We talk about wealth. We talk about strategy. We talk about legacy. But legacy requires longevity. You cannot leave something behind if you burn out, break down, or check out before your time. Mental health is not a sidebar to your success. It is the foundation of it.

Pick up Dr. Rheeda Walker's book. Get honest with yourself. Get honest with the people you love. And if you need to talk to somebody, talk to somebody. A therapist is not a sign that you failed. It is a sign that you are serious about finishing what you started.

We take care of your wealth. We take care of your strategy. And we take care of your mental health, because none of the rest of it works without it.

Kellen Coleman, M.A. is the founder and managing principal of Coleman Public Relations and Consulting Firm LLC (CPRFIRM). Learn more at cprfirm.com.

Coleman's Final Thought: The strongest thing you can do for your family, your business, and your legacy is to stop performing wellness and start pursuing it. Your home should feel like the vacation, not something you are fleeing from. Build the inside first.

References

Lindsey, M. A., et al. (2024). Still ringing the alarm: An enduring call to action for Black youth suicide prevention. JAMA Network Open, 7(6), e2416491.

Pew Charitable Trusts. (2024, April 22). Black adolescent suicide rate reveals urgent need to address mental health care barriers. https://www.pew.org

Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. (2023). Ring the alarm: The crisis of Black youth suicide in America. Emergency Task Force on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health.

Sheftall, A. H., et al. (2022). Black youth suicide: Investigation of current trends and precipitating circumstances. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 61(5), 662-675. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2021.08.021

Jed Foundation. (2026, March). New CDC data show youth suicide rates are declining but our work is far from over. https://jedfoundation.org

Walker, R. (2020). The unapologetic guide to Black mental health. New Harbinger Publications.