Mental Health Mondays

donna9975
Sep 21
2 min read

Updated: Oct 7

Mental Health Mondays (MHMs) is the centerpiece of our Community-HOPE Program. It began as a spin-off of Urban Strategies’ popular “Erasing the Stigma in the African American Community, Real Talk Conversations: Opioid Use Disorder,” a program that began in 2021. The Erasing Stigma Project provided a space for African Americans to discuss the stigma attached to seeking care for substance use disorders. In Spring of 2020, during the Covid Pandemic, this series went online, and people from throughout the United States were able to “attend” the virtual sessions.

When funding ended, we were quickly inundated with requests to continue the series because, due to Covid and its after effects, there was a growing mental health crisis occurring throughout the United States. Our increasingly fragmented African American Community was particularly hard hit by Covid. Mental Health Mondays (MHM) provided a space for Black people to learn, talk, and share about the struggles they were experiencing in their daily lives … not just due to Covid, but due to … just life.

Each Mental Health Monday session is led by a mental health professional who facilitates a discussion on a variety of subjects including opioid use disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, how to find a therapist, etc. These sessions have proven to be extraordinarily successful, with participants calling in from the Bay Area, throughout California, other states and even other countries.

MHM provides culturally-competent virtual mental health care to Black people wherever they may live. We address the unique mental health, social and emotional challenges faced by our communities. We examine the impact of systemic racism, historical trauma, and underrepresentation in traditional mental health services. By leveraging this virtual platform we have been able to provide a convenient and stigma-reducing resource that builds resilience in the Black Community.

By providing a safe forum to discuss subjects that have been historically taboo in the Black Community, MHM works to dismantle those barriers to care, promote healing and contribute to the broader goal of mental health equity and decreased use of opioids in our community. Through accessible, culturally-competent, and stigma-reducing resources, the program empowers individuals, advances community resilience, and improves the overall well-being of the Black Community.