Cultural Survival Skills

Into The Darkness: America’s Mental Health Problems

The following is an important re-blog from 10/30/09.

She had walked about three miles in the dark and was lost before she found my office. It was cold and raining as she walked through the “wrong side of town” to seek my help. Her journey took her through tough streets where rapes, robberies and gang shootings happen almost every week.

She was a very slight waif of a young woman and she hid in an over-sized hooded sweat shirt.  Her head and face were recessed into the protection of the jacket’s dark hood. She had withdrawn from the world around her.

I expressed my concern that she had walked at night through a dangerous area of our city. She said that she wasn’t afraid because when she “walks at night no one can see her”. She sat in my room with her head bent down. The hood…