To be gobsmacked by this article?

[Babycham1979]

So, I promised myself I'd stop reading the Guardian, but I couldn't resist. Today, I found myself reading this gem;

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/08/black-women-mental-health-high-rates-depression-anxiety

Now, the distparities in mental health prevalnce and treatment among different social and ethnic groups are serious, and desperately need to be addressed. However, is it just me, or are these not just examples of how to be a normal grown-up of any sex or colour!? More Guardian identitiy politics bullshit!

Zoe, a 27-year-old pharmacist, wrote: “I am treated like I’m odd just for being myself and doing the things I like to do. I’m always viewed through the eyes of people’s narrow-minded expectations.”

Or, "Why do I have to change who I am so that people don’t find me intimidating or aggressive?” wrote Michelle, a 27-year-old teacher. “It’s tiring to have to always conform to get ahead.”

And, “I can’t embrace who I am, fully,” typed Grace, a 24-year-old PA. “I need to make sure people are always comfortable with me.”

Baby I would say I feel something similar most of the time. But then I'm not British and even after 20 years I still 'stick out' and I am made to feel uncomfortable.

Now I would find it hard if this was MY country.

the examples in article are what most people (women?) will experience at one point or another.

But surely its about the frequency of the experiences. Everyone feels like that sometimes, but if it is happening often, and you can see that other people are treated differently despite having the same behaviour, then that does suggest there's something more doing on.

larazopf That's the second time you've made the point wrt the Guardian's article being in some way perpetuating the racist stereotype (to paraphrase you). The first time I thought you were being ironic but now I'm simply just bemused that you cannot grasp how and why, and the need for critical stories.

The article in itself is not a fact-finding exercise it details the lived experience of those (black women) who have suffered with MH. By your logic then there shouldn't be any coverage of gay people being discriminated against or disabled people struggling to get by in day to day life. It must honestly be like groundhog day for you everyday. I'd also assume you think the news shouldn't cover storms or tsunamis lest we encourage them more

larazopf - black women aren't 'naturally more aggressive', that's the whole point!

op has made it clear that she believes there are disparities and that she thinks the examples given are poor and reflect poor journalism

No the OP hasn't. The OP has quite clearly dismissed the views in the article. And I've already asked it once but I'll ask it again - who has the right to judge whether these are 'poor' examples. The irony of a most and least deserving racism article isn't lost on me.

Would you rather they did a feature on one of the Williams sisters or a black footballer who has had bananas thrown at him on the pitch? It's not about the most deserving or least deserving. It's about racism in all its forms and whether you or OP don't think the women in the article deserve to be there is not really your call to make. I personally think it's for the best that insidious forms of racism and such are brought to light.

Come on give op a break, the examples in article are what most people (women?) will experience at one point or another. there must be better ones, which the guardian journo did not mother to collect. it is a lazy article. not surprised

Again. It's not an either or exercise. It's not a zero sum game. It is the lived experiences of those mentioned in the article. There are plenty of column inches to go round. I read a lot of articles about feminism and women being discriminated against and such like and no one (here on MN at least) questions why they used those particular women for the story or the story itself - the general point is to raise the awareness about women being discriminated against. Here we have a newspaper that has dedicated space to black women suffering from MH problems and lo and behold there are so many complaints and whataboutery arguments regarding it. It's really quite astonishing. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it means we haven't quite left those prejudices behind i.e. why should these black women have an article dedicated to them, they're not important.

Ah Mrs D, with all due respect (I name changed today, lurk mostly but really like your posts when i read them!!!)

"lara the point is that they are NOT naturally aggressive. It is that they are perceived as aggressive due to their ethnicity so they feel that they have to be less 'aggressive' than their white colleagues."

Of course i understood it this. What I meant to say (too tired to articulate myself properly) was that a black woman who is 'naturally' even tempered might not feel like she has to curb her temper to fit in and others might feel 'naturally' more at ease or less defensive with her, whereas a black woman who feels agitated more easily as part of her individual character will feel that she has to reign her temper in, which could make her anxious as it is hard work to control your temper i should know.

"A 20 year old white woman getting upset during a meeting = embarrassing show of emotions"

now you are generalising! she would just as likely be seen as a bully, whimsical etc. depending on whether she shouted or cried... My previous boss was so volatile, and a bit unstable. We all pretty quickly figured this out and were damn well on our guards, she was not very popular. She wasn't given any credit for being 'white'.

"A 20 year old black woman getting upset during a meeting = potentially dangerous situation".

No! Pleased don't think this. I have worked in London for many years in culturally diverse offices. I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the people i have worked with would support her and, if not, it would be because she was not well liked due to her personality and general attitude towards others.

"This is why black communities are wary of becoming involved with police etc."

I do get this point. Without knowing the facts, could this be in response to crime statistics? Sorry, i don't mean to play this one down.

Ha! I saw the same article today and thought 'typical Guardian'

I think OP does grasp the issue but wants to create a thread disparaging the experiences of black women experiencing mental health, and in so many instances being deemed as having mental issues due to the negative stereotype of being loud, aggressive, angry etc, not allowed to be upset when discriminated against.

It beggars belief really that such a dissertation would even be taken on board but its also very telling, as is this thread itself, that this particular subject was chosen. Its bullshit, OP has probably been rightly shouted down for her views in real life, thats if she ever dared air them and isn't over-focused on 1 woman she is bothered about, who knows. & likely has a grudge going on somewhere - and in case anyone says different, its common enough I have come across it more times than I can count. But MN is a very easy and safe place to throw out silly nonsense such as this, and get measured responses from fairminded sensible people who are, in effect, wasting their time talking to a brick wall who wants to create negative tirade dressed up as debate.

There's a difference between (a) wanting to understand, and logically debate issues experienced by people who have been othered & (b) being goady, offensive and troublesome. OP is in the (b) camp.

Nothing new really, always have been people telling "othered" either that they shouldn't feel, or how to feel, but the motive behind that doesn't tend to be lack of understanding.

x post Mr DV

"She was shouting at him"
This puts her in the wrong nasty woman

However,

"His blackness was enough for her to imagine him intimidating."
was it though? it could have been his 'maleness' or just her being unhinged, she sounds like it if she was shouting in the workplace.

It's not a great article. There is very little of substance about the mh issues faced by women of colour - and while being of a different culture is a huge issue for any ethnic minority facing mh issues, particularly in gaining appropriate access to intervention, the writing isn't very clear and at times it seems quite minimising of mh issues in the use of these anodyne filler phrases.

Irish people in Britain tend to have the same profile (and often worse profiles) of mental health concern as other ethnic minorities sustaining across second and third generations, despite being white and, in subsequent generations, not at all distinguishable from white British people, so unlikely to contact any difficult contexts with reference to their "identity".

Irish-born migrants in Britain are 2 to 3 and a half times more likely to be hospitalised for mh issues than any other ethnic grouping, with the exception of psychosis in the Afro-Carribean community. Worldwide, the Irish diaspora experience increased mortality and morbidity across generations which appears unaccounted for through socioeconomic position, but some analyses have shown to relate to early childhood poverty/adversity etc.

We don't like to raise it for fear of stigma, but sometimes some communities just experience more mental illness than others. In particular, some ex-colonial populations are hugely more susceptible to mh issues, possibly through genetic expression of long-standing, chronic adversity in their ancestry. Again, not something most of us want to look at in much detail.

Some communities also have very harsh child-rearing practices or very rigid patterns of religious or cultural belief that are shaming, or cultures where emotional expression is not only discouraged but subject to very harsh punishment. Alcohol abuse patterns are also much higher in many of the ethnic communities who suffer mental illness and this may be as much due to higher susceptibility to mental distress as it is to addiction itself.

It's a little more complex than "oh people think I'm an angry black woman so I got schizophrenia".. and also, how you think of your depression/anxiety/mh issues have come about when in the throes of it doesn't actually translate into "truth" because it's your lived experience. I have my own lived experience of mh issues and when you ARE depressed or gripped by severe anxiety your mind will tell you all sorts of improbable, often disconnected stories about why you are suffering as you are. That doesn't mean experience of lived testimony isn't important to mh services, but a Whatsapp group probably won't yield the most useful data....

Adrenaline, you almost seem to be playing a game of, 'if you don't agree with me, you're a racist'.

It's not whataboutery to question the strength of a lousy article. I stand by my point; racism exists; MH issues amongst different social groups are significant and complex; but that the examples cited in the article are absurd. They don't support the writer's contention, they make a mockery of it.

Real racism exists, as do real mental health problems. It looks like the author couldn't be arsed to actually find any, so added a couple of mates on Whatsapp and copied-adn-pasted a couple of barely-relevant quotes.

There's actually been a lot of academic research on the 'angry black woman stereotype' which shows that (a) black women are not more aggressive than whites but (b) they are perceived as being so - aggressive, volatile, "sassy".

If anyone has access to JSTOR or Lexis etc the most recent in-depth example I can find is 2009 by the University of Iillinois - Debunking the Myth of the “Angry Black Woman”: An Exploration of Anger in Young African American Wome - J. Celeste Walley-Jean.

It's actually quite depressing that on a female forum people are downplaying the existence of stereotypes and their effect. We're all aware of the man assertive / women bossy, men commanding / women shrill hypocrisy. If a woman wrote here about problems with a male colleague taking a stereotypical attitude to women there'd be sympathy and understanding. But when black women point out they suffer from it, they are met with denial.

YABU. This is an 'observation'.. based on a study... It is not saying this is true.. or that we should be acting on it necessarily... just observing, noting and probabaly worth doing some more research into.
There is no point, whatsoever in shrieking about this until we have better evidence...and thereby lies the point...this is an article written based on an observation....it's not unreasonable to mark it, note it, do more work on it... but to make assumptions about it is wrong until there is a veracity supported by more evidence .

MistressDeeCee, jesus! Now who's projecting? Ironically, you now seem to be telling others what the do or don't think/feel.

No grievances or issues in my life that I'm aware of, certainly none regarding ethnicity. You seem to have decided that I'm white. Are you sure of this? How so?

BreakWindandFire I agree. It's disheartening but then I'm one of those pesky bleeding-heart feminists. The examples given weren't great but qualitative data is important for these sorts of issues. Actually looking at people's experiences as well as just data etc.

I want to know what Michelle actually does, and who says she's intimidating and aggressive and why they say that. Is she actually aggressive and intimidating, or does she behave in exactly the same way as any other teacher of any colour? Are the people who see her as intimidating and aggressive overly timid, or are they typical parents? Is it merely that Michelle sees herself as intimidating and agressive, but no one else does?

Unless the article specifies the circumstances of the qualities attributed to Michelle, her complaint is just a complaint, like any other. Assuming that is the case, then I think it sounds like an article written by a crap journo who doesn't give a fuck and makes things up.

Adrenaline, you almost seem to be playing a game of, 'if you don't agree with me, you're a racist'

No. That's not really my approach. I see nuances and subjectivity in life, as such I don't see life as black and white so to speak. What you are now doing is trying to undermine the arguments of those who disagree with you in a very basic fashion. Another typical method of those who wish to shut down debate but can't put forward a reasoned argument without being slippery - in the way you initially were when you actually thought the article should be dismissed to now when you think it's an important issue but just written badly. I have taken issue even with your latter stance. I don't quite understand why you get to say who and what is worthy of featuring in such an article. I initially agreed that this is typical of the Guardian but considering the other papers out there e.g. The Independent, The Telegraph, FT, Economist and so forth, the Guardian is doing great work to bring this to the fore of the agenda. What I take issue with is the article being in the 'life and style' section - alongside Jay Raynor's restaurant of the week or whatever or that other guy that does features on how to eat toast or chips or whatever.

A study has already been referenced that's based on those stereotypes. It's not made up even if the reliability of the article is zilch.

And I stopped reading the Guardian because I find their anti-corbyn rants grating and the contrast between trying to be on the side of the "99%" but then posting lifestyle articles that are painfully pretentious and not representative.

But I do admire the way they try to report on these things. The others rarely try at all.