Mentally Interesting: The Myth of the Strong Black Woman

Mentally Interesting Episode 1028 January 2022bbc.co.uk/ouch/podcastPresented by Mark Brown and Seaneen MolloyMusicFeaturing upcoming clips.

Seaneen -
This is Mentally Interesting, which is a show all about mental health and the weird stuff that goes on inside our heads. I’m Seaneen Molloy. 

Mark -
And I’m Mark Brown. We’ve been friends for ages me and Seaneen, and we love talking about all of this mental health stuff. This episode is about hope: what hope means to us, how you get hope, how you lose hope, and the link between hope and mental health. We’ll also be talking about some stuff that makes us hopeful for the future, and also some stuff that doesn’t.

Seaneen -
Our guest today is Rianna Walcott, and she’s going to tell us about her upcoming book, The Colour of Madness. And as usual there is an amazing brilliant new feature near the end.

Mark -
This is the last episode of Mentally Interesting on BBC Ouch for now. So, when you’ve finished listening to this episode you could, if you wanted to, check out our previous nine episodes on BBC Sounds. 

Seaneen -
And if you’ve already been with us on the previous nine episodes thanks very much for joining us.[Music] So, today we’re talking about hope. I think hope means something different for everybody. For me it’s not like some bright shiny rainbow moment; it’s kind of finding a space that you think can make things better, and having kind of curiosity about how life is going to turn out. 

Mark -
Yes absolutely. I think for me hope is a really weird thing. It’s really different from optimism because optimism is just assuming that everything is going to turn out all right, and I don’t think people like us get to assume that ever. 

Seaneen -
No.

Mark -
Because things often don’t turn out all right. I think hope is like seeing that things are happening now that will have a positive effect in the future. So, it’s all about concrete stuff for me. I think it’s really, really easy to be cynical, super cynical. All the cool kids are cynical, you know, dark glasses and rollneck sweaters and all that.

Seaneen -
Yeah, I was actually more cynical when I was younger. People talk about as you get older you get a bit more long in the tooth and jaded, but that’s kind of not been my experience. I’ve become a bit more fluffy and fuzzy.

Mark -
I’m exactly the same because I thought it was really, really super, super exciting and cool to be cynical. Like people would go, oh would you like a cherry Bakewell, and I’d be like, no because we will all die soon. So, I know what you mean about getting more fuzzy as you get older, but I think that’s more to do with the patterns of ageing for me. So, I’m starting to have to pluck my ears and stuff. But what is it that’s really made you feel warmer and cuddly and more fuzzy as you’ve got older?

Seaneen -
I mean, there’s a really boring answer to that which is like having children.

Mark -
Aw.

Seaneen -
Yeah, they’re like little horrible house-wrecking fuzzy chicks.

Mark -
I believe they’re our future. 

Seaneen -
They are our future, our horrific, terrible, nuclear war future. I think it’s just got me out of my head basically. And whereas I had I guess a more cynical wider-world view, having these very simple focuses almost has just made me a bit softer. I kind of react to things more around me than I do around like big things in the world. I’m not sure that makes any sense. But basically because it’s easy sometimes to think that everything is terrible and everyone is terrible, but I think focusing even on the small innocent interactions has kind of softened me up a bit.

Mark -
When I was younger I didn’t have much hope for the future because I didn’t see anything that looked particularly hopeful. I just saw me kind of malfunctioning away for the next ten years and then, I don’t know, the heat death of the universe or something. It was only as I got older that I started to really feel anything that might be called hope. I think one of the defining things for me in terms of finding hope in the future was a slightly badly shaven man in a very, very cold church hall in Deptford back at right at the start of this century did something that really, really changed my life. At that time I had fallen out of university, I was absolutely done in, I was off my nut – if you might like to call it like that – absolutely skint, no recourse to funds at all. And I came under the care of the community mental health team. And the person at the community mental health team said, ‘yeah I do think you’ve got problems with your mental health so we’ll try and sort that out, but also you need some money’. And he wrote me out a little address on a slip of paper, handed it me, and he said, ‘go and see this fella at the community advice service’. So, obviously being me it took me four or five weeks to pluck up the courage to do that. And it was in a freezing cold church hall, and it was just a man with a desk and an ashtray. Because this was the start of the century when you could still smoke. And he talked me through what I would need to do to get benefits, filled my form in for me, gave me a cup of sweet milky tea and he said, ‘look son, do you want a cigarette?’ And it was the most human that anyone had done for me for ages. It wasn’t about bureaucracy, it wasn’t about having a revolution, it wasn’t about failing at university; it was just someone very honestly going, ‘you look like you’re having a terrible time, what can I do to give you comfort?’ And that for me made me realise that hope comes from individual acts of kindness and community. I finally managed to get benefits when I couldn’t previously; that gave me a little bit of stability. And then things kind of took off from there. Can you think of any tiny human interactions that made you think that the world wasn’t an absolutely terrible bleak and uncaring place?

Seaneen -
It hasn’t been anything big and bombastic; it has been being treated like a human being in a difficult time. It was actually kind of similar except it wasn’t a mis-shaven man, it was a woman. I’ve been in the mental health system for years, and a lot of the focus on it was basically bipolar disorder and manic episodes and depression, and they have been very debilitating. But one of the lesser spotted things in my life and has destroyed large parts of it has been anxiety, particularly anxiety around death. Which we talked about with Julia a few episodes ago. 

Mark -
Julia Samuel.

Seaneen -
Yeah, we were talking about grief, and I was talking about my death anxiety. It’s so debilitating, it was just crushing me. And I actually hadn’t really seen a doctor about it. when I’ve been with psychiatrists it’s more focused on the all-singing, all-dancing complete destruction of the world kind of moods. I couldn’t take it anymore basically. I was having panic attacks every time I went outside. I couldn’t cross the road; I was having trouble even pressing crossing signs because I was so frightened I was going to die, I was going to get hit by a car. And I went to see a doctor, and my experiences with GPs especially have not been great, but she really listened and then she said, what an awful thing you’ve had to carry around for the past 15 years. And I just burst into tears because it was sort of like an acknowledgement of how I felt, which I’d had this black stone kind of in my chest. And it was just really nice. And it actually made me feel better because I felt like if I’m carrying this around and someone knows I am then maybe it can be lifted, you know.

Mark -
I think it’s really difficult sometimes to feel hopeful when you feel alone.

Seaneen -
Yeah.

Mark -
Because you’re kind of trapped in a circle or a cycle of yourself where there’s nothing from the outside, apart from your own strength of will and your own desire to succeed that really kind of changes the course of your thoughts. It’s really great when you can get that kind of sense of things changing and things being better from outside of you. And it’s really hard when you kind of grow up somewhere where there isn’t much hope going around. The west end of Newcastle didn’t feel like a particularly hopeful place when I was growing up because of Thatcher and all of the industries closing and stuff like that. So, any time I said something hopeful like, ‘you know what, I think I might be okay at doing art, I’d quite like to do A-level art’, my dad would just go, ‘yeah well how’s that going to make you any money, get your feet back on the ground man’. What was it like in Northern Ireland growing up?

Seaneen -
Well, yeah, Northern Ireland during the Troubles great, a craic. I grew up around the tail-end of the Troubles so born in the 80s, you were confronted every day with hopelessness. Literally outside my front door there would be soldiers with guns. The kind of turning point in Northern Ireland was the Good Friday Agreement and stuff, and that was a moment I think when they felt like there was some hope. And that’s why it’s very difficult with some of the stuff going on in Northern Ireland now, it feels like there’s a bit of a regression. Northern Ireland has very poor mental health because so many people are really traumatised. We’ve all had losses, I mean everyone; I don’t know anyone who hasn’t lost somebody in the Troubles or hasn’t had a frightening experience. So, that was growing up for me. But of course I’m hopeful. I have to be hopeful here because I wouldn’t have moved back with [inaudible 10:13] if I didn’t have hope that things would change and be better. What’s making you feel hopeful about the future? 

Mark -
Hearing you talk about Northern Ireland there it kind of feels like you and everyone else who grew up there and lives there kind of did an amazing collective job of escaping from cynicism. Basically escaping from the idea that nothing is ever going to change. And for me on a day-to-day basis the things that give me hope are just seeing things happening. So, for the last year, which has been in a lot of ways been the worst time in my entire life, it’s been absolutely bloody horrible, it’s been being involved with the vaccination effort and just seeing my colleagues, many of them retired, many of them in their 70s and 80s, who have kind of come back to the world after one year of pandemic to give away hours and hours and hours just helping people get their vaccinations. And it’s felt amazing for me just to be part of doing something with people, who weren’t like banging the table or having massive great world-changing ideas; it’s just like there’s something that needs sorting out here, let’s get together and sort it out. And that’s really given me hope for something. In the rest of my work the things that really give me goosebumps are hearing about small groups of people in communities who get together to do things. So, I’m thinking about there’s a guy who is a trained psychologist who is also from the traveller community, and he recognised lots of bad mental health in the traveller community, so he just set up a helpline for traveller young people and others, and especially traveller people who aren’t straight, just to have a talk really just off his own back. An organisation that I work with gave him a small grant to set that up. All he needed was a phone and some mobile phone data. Those kinds of stories of everyday people helping other people in their community to solve problems and communities coming together just give me goosebumps, like really do.

Seaneen -
It sounds a bit like we’re sort of like BBC, community heroes. But I agree with you, I think that is one of the things that makes me feel hopeful. I was talking about the Troubles here and stuff, what’s come out of that is there are a lot of collective community efforts to make things better here, especially for young people. And I sound like an old git; there’s a lot of criticism thrown at young people today, especially during the pandemic people were like, selfish people, selfish little brats going out and having parties and all that kind of stuff. But they had to sacrifice so much. I think they made some of the greatest sacrifices of anyone during the pandemic. And I think a lot of young people today are so socially conscious and so aware and are trying and want to make the world a better place and are creative about it. I think that’s really great. I’m not a young person anymore, which my head still can’t get around, but I feel like the current generation is pretty awesome to be honest.

Mark -
You’ve just given me goosebumps there. 

Seaneen -
Go on the kids! 

Mark -
Go on, go on the bends!

Seaneen -
I think there’s been a generational shift on things like racism, transphobia, homophobia, thinking about gender and stuff. And those kinds of progressive ideas taken into the next generation will make the world a better place I think. [Music] Welcome to our guest, Rianna Walcott. Rianna is a PhD candidate at Kings College London and she’s researching black women’s identify formation in digital spaces. She frequently writes about race, feminism, mental health, arts and culture, and is co-director of an anthology about black, Asian and minority ethnic mental health, The Colour of Madness. And she’s a professional jazz singer to boot.

Mark -
Cor!

Seaneen -
That’s a lot. Welcome Rianna, hi.

Rianna -

Hi, thanks. I don’t know why I always leave that last bit in my bio, as though it’s ever going to be relevant.

Seaneen -
It’s super impressive; it’s very good.

Rianna -

Thanks.

Mark -
We always ask our guests this question, Rianna: what makes you mentally interesting?

Rianna -

I think that’s a lovely way to put it, first of all. What makes me mentally interesting are the choices that I make to make myself happy in the moment and in the future. I think rather than thinking about all of the things that make me mentally unwell, I think this is a lovely way to put it to think about actually, some of these things make my choices and my actions mentally interesting. 

Seaneen -
That is a lovely way to put it. So, what was it that got you starting writing and talking about mental health in a public way?

Rianna -

Probably what starts most people actually: realising that I was not doing very well. It personally came whilst I was doing my undergraduate degree I first started dealing with what I now recognise to be depression and anxiety. That was the moment where I started looking into it, started having the words to vocalise it. In fact, if I can pinpoint it to a specific time it was actually while I was on a year abroad in the States, and that happened to coincide with pretty much the origin, the beginning of talking about Black Lives Matter, and understanding myself as someone who was inside of academic institutions, dealing with strains and stresses that perhaps my white peers weren’t. Like what happens when you’re trying to access healthcare and you are in a country like the US where their healthcare system is different to ours back here? What happens when you are a person of colour who has not grown up with the language to talk about these issues? What happens when you’re a woman? Or what happens when you are differently abled? What happens when you’re a queer person? How do all of these different facets of identity interact with our mental health? And I think just figuring that our for myself, I’ve always been a talker, so figuring that out for myself when I was at that particularly vulnerable point is what led me here. And I’m still doing it.

Seaneen -
So, you mentioned you were under additional stresses and strains; can you tell us a bit more about those?

Rianna -

Yeah, I mean even just blanket strains of being a black person in like a white institution. A really good example I’ve got is when I first looked into getting counselling I went to my university service, and I got this meeting with a counsellor, and I thought that she was unable to see what was actually going on with me, or unable to understand the way that pain looked on a non-white person. So, I was saying, ‘okay my grades are okay, this is all okay, but I really don’t feel well, I don’t feel good’. But she basically said, ‘well your grades are okay, everything seems fine to me, go home, take a bath…

Seaneen -
Oh, the bath, the bath.

Mark -
The bath of healing!

Rianna -

…come back when you actually need the service’. It’s difficult to explain to someone who wasn’t in that moment or perhaps who wasn’t also a person of colour that I knew that she didn’t read what was happening to me as real or urgent because I didn’t cry. And so after that I knew that every time I wanted, like if I was speaking to someone and I needed them to see humanity in me or I needed them to accept, okay this is trauma 101, I needed to make sure I cried. Like understanding that as being part of the myth of the strong black woman stopping me from actually getting the services that I need definitely impacted the way that I look at healthcare in this country.

Mark -
So, those kinds of experiences must have fed into The Colour of Madness, the book that you’ve got coming out later this year. A lot of people think this is quite an important book. For anyone who’s not had a chance to see the first edition or see any previews to the second edition, what’s in it?

Rianna -

It's a collection of art, essays, poetry, fiction, some academic pieces all together in this anthology that looks at mental health through the visible light colour spectrum where we cut up different experiences according to these different chapters that explain the difference or facet of being a person of colour in the UK, and experiencing healthcare. 

Seaneen -
Were there any recurring themes that came through in the book?

Rianna -

Oh absolutely. We tried to organise it according to those recurring themes. But some of the ones that maybe might interest people most is people talking about how it related to religion and spirituality; people talking about their experiences within institutions, both as patients but also from practitioners; we have people talking about perhaps mental health illnesses and things like that that you wouldn’t – this is going to sound really weird – necessarily think of in relation to people of colour.

Mark -
Like what?

Rianna -

What I mean by that is that when you think about, say, anorexia or eating disorders the poster girl for that is…

Seaneen -
Thin white girl.

Rianna -

…a thin white girl. 

Seaneen -
Yeah.

Rianna -

But how does that then relate to black women, or when we think about the ways that lots of different people of colour have different relationships to food and nurturing and maternal relationships around food and stuff? So, really wanting to make sure that we change the way that we think about mental health illnesses and understand the way that that looks on other people. Because we didn’t feel that something was doing that yet.Something that has come up both in the book and in my own personal experience is thinking about mental health and the difficulties that happen when you are trying to seek treatment as a person of colour in the UK, there’s this double-edged sort of stigma around it where going home and saying, oh I needed this medication, is nine times out of ten not going to go down well. So, there’s lots of people who have had this experience of their parents or family members being really deeply uncomfortable with the idea of them taking medication that impacts brain chemistry or whatever. There’s a real, real heavy stigma against it. That doesn’t even just go as far as antidepressants and things like that. Culturally, and I can speak for Caribbean families, we don’t even really want to take paracetamol; there’s always some sort of herbal remedy that you should be doing instead. 

Mark -
Why is that?

Rianna -

Well, I can say why that is actually. My grandparents are from the Caribbean. My grandma’s from Barbados. And a population of sort of 300,000, very small island, there are two hospitals. So, if you’re sick your first port of call isn’t to go to the hospital or go to the doctors; you’re going to drink a specific tea, you’re going to make a poultice out of banana leaves and something, something, something. And that kind of attitude we just carried with us over here. And then you’re trying to go to the NHS and ask for something that we don’t necessarily understand or use at home.

Mark -
It sounds really isolating.

Rianna -

It can be difficult. When I first started taking antidepressants it was not an easy thing to discuss with my parents. In fact I wouldn’t even have told them if it hadn’t been for them finding, like something out of a TV show, they found the packet in my bin. It’s all better now, but that beginning conversation for me and for so many others is very, very difficult to have. 

Seaneen -
And how do you combat that then? How can it change?

Rianna -

I’m not trying to say that it’s specifically a terrible thing or that they’re entirely wrong even, because medical racism is something that we’re also dealing with in this country. You can relate that.

Seaneen -
Yeah.

Rianna -

So, their wanting to keep things holistic, wanting to keep things as they understand, just speaks to a wider history of black people not being treated well by healthcare systems. So, who am I to say that they’re foolish or whatever for that? That’s not my place. But in the future I know that my children, if they do need access to these sorts of things, I’ll be a bit more understanding because I’ve had that experience. The experience is the only thing we can hope for.

Seaneen -
I don’t know if you listened to the loneliness episode, but we had Shuranjeet who…

Rianna -

Yeah.

Seaneen -
But just when you were talking about needing to cry in front of a doctor to get help reminded me of what he was talking about with older women whose experiences of mental distress were manifesting physically and it was being completely missed.

Rianna -

Yes, like I have a stomach ache, that comes up a lot as well. The language to talk about it is so different among different communities, right. 

Seaneen -
Rianna, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been brilliant to chat to you.

Rianna -

Thank you so much for having me. 

Seaneen -
[Sirens and bells] As usual we have our fabulous fascinating feature for you. And this time it is: most absurd habits that you keep secret but you are also sharing with all of our listeners. Keep it secret.

Mark -
Shh.

Seaneen -
I do have an absurd secret habit.

Mark -
Tell me.

Seaneen -
It is basically when I’m depressed or I’m feeling a bit low what I do is I go looking for bad reviews of really banal things. I go through Airbnb and put in Belfast or Newcastle or somewhere close, and then I just like score it for anything under four stars, and then I’m in there reading, just rubbing my hands with glee at someone having a toilet that didn’t flush or bed sheets that were slightly crumpled. And I think it’s because I am naturally drawn to terrible things because that’s the way that my brain works. And unfortunately the terrible things that I’ve been drawn to in the past are things like, oh here’s things about children dying, or here’s something about the eventual heat death of the universe. So, to kind of protect my mental health I have dialled it down to getting my terrible things fix by reading terrible reviews of boring things. 

Mark -
Banal bad things.

Seaneen -
Banal bad things, I’ve literally sat in the bath, the magic mental health bath that makes everything better apparently, on my phone scrolling through one-star reviews on Trip Advisor. And it’s great. What about you, what’s your absurd habit?

Mark -
Well, every single place I go I look for the worst reviews of it. I can’t resist it. But my favourite bad review ever was one that was for a sex swing on an internet shopping site that said, it was great, me and the wife loved it, you have to hang it over the back of the door, and it was great until the door fell off. [Laughter] My absurd one is slightly less whimsical but even more absurd, which is if I feel like I’ve let someone down in the past and they give me a present it takes me about a year to open the present because I feel like I don’t deserve it. Which is so ridiculous. 

Seaneen -
Oh you poor…you’re just lovely.

Mark -
Not lovely. It’s frustrating for the person who gave me the present, ‘did you enjoy that book I gave you?’ ‘Yeah, it’s lovely.’ It’s still sitting in its wrapping on the shelf. I don’t know why I do it, but it is absurd. So, now you all know that and no one will ever give me a present ever again. 

Seaneen -
Or annoy you or fall out with you ever again hopefully. [Music] So, that’s it for this series of Mentally Interesting. Thanks for being with us every week in January and throughout 2021 too. If this is your first time listening there are nine more episodes available on the Ouch feed on BBC Sounds. 

Mark -
So, that just leaves us to say thank you, a massive thank you to Emma Tracey, our producer, and Dave O’Neill our studio manager. And that’s it from us. So, here’s one of our trademark long and awkward goodbyes. Goodbye. 

Seaneen -
Thank you, bye.

Mark -
Bye. See you. It’s been lovely. See you soon. Bye. Goodbye.