[Posted Nov. 16, 2007]
Part 2:
Silent Killers That
Threaten Black
Community
By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide
About 50 years ago when Ray Seward was earning money, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation had not yet released its 2007 report on depression in African Americans. Seward remembers the days of shining shoes or selling coal and kerosene from his mother’s old station wagon, which he pushed through the streets of the Berkley neighborhood he lived in with his mother and four sisters.
Dr. Janis Sanchez
But would a study that calls depression the No. 1 silent killer make more blacks confront their own silent despair today? Probably not. According to records cited at the recent Congressional Black Caucus conference, which was attended by mental health experts and lawmakers, most blacks (63 percent) characterized depression as a personal weakness. Meanwhile, only 31 percent said they believe it a serious medical problem.
“You are often not socialized to talk about feelings, things that are hurting you,” said Dr. Janis Sanchez, an Old Dominion University psychology professor who also heads the psychology department. “There’s a sense of inner despair that people work to hide from themselves and then from each other.”
“So you minimize it (your own silent despair),” Sanchez, explained. “Somehow a person thinks he should solve it on his own. People become desensitized to their own depression and engage in many different habits and activities to hide it.”
For example, depressed men are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Women, meanwhile, are more likely to hide depression by hopping in and out of multiple relationships, sprinting from man to man to mask inner despair.
“It often occurs when people think they can’t control or change what is happening to them,” Sanchez explained.
“There are families that are depressed but don’t realize it because it’s the only kind of behavior they’re ever seen. We can’t accurately predict who will get depressed.
“What is tricky about inner despair is we do not know why some people have it and others do not,” Sanchez said. “We don’t know why it strikes some people more deeply. But I don’t think that being black or poor necessarily causes depression.”
Some Get Depressed; Others Don’t
A case in point is Seward and millions like him, who came of age in the sixties during the affirmative action era which opened doors of opportunity that were previously closed.
If this means entry into the middle class surfaced with depression, as some experts claim, then did trailblazing stress and unfamiliar trauma rewire the brain, as more blacks tried to cope with changing environments, new hopes and expectations?
“I’ve had my ups and downs but more ups than downs,” said Seward, who has owned Eagle Auto Sales on North Military Highway since 1994.
“That’s how we survived for many years,” said Seward who began working at age ten. He listed other jobs he held at a young age. For example, he worked six days a week as a teenager at Tidewater Rail Service to earn $125 a month, cleaning rooms, washing dishes and making beds.
Yes, times were hard, Seward said. Challenges mounted as the years passed. “My mother would encourage me. But everything I’ve achieved since then came from the hard work I first started doing at my mother’s house.”
Moreover, Seward went on to earn an undergraduate degree at Norfolk State and a graduate degree at Virginia State.
Then, he taught in the public school system. By day, he taught industrial education classes at Kempsville High. By night, he ran a small convenience store he bought on a rough corner of Virginia Beach Boulevard.
“I was afraid to close the store at night for fear of people robbing my commodities,” he said. So he would man his cash register until midnight. Then he would sleep in the back of his store each night. The next morning, he’d head to his teaching job, which Seward resigned from in 1983, after ten years of teaching and ringing a cash register.
Over the years, he slowly bought several more convenience stores, a nightclub and three gentlemen’s clubs. Branching out, he eventually owned five convenience stores throughout Hampton Roads.
“I never imagined I’d do what I’m doing now, but I went from business to business trying to get ahead in life,” said Seward who operates Eagle Auto Sales with six employees. He also has help from his wife, Nora, and son, Raymond.
So why didn’t depression attack and disable Seward, since it strikes more than 19 million Americans each year, and six million men? It can even lead to suicide, which has been the third leading cause of death in black men ages 15-24 since 1980.
Seward, who said he was robbed of $3000 cash at gunpoint last year, acknowledges that he has experienced stress. Whether it was the first job he accepted at age ten, or the black on black crime statistics he’s knows about firsthand, the ingredients for depression have been a part of his (professional) life for almost 50 years.
But Seward is not depressed. Of the recent robbery at his auto dealership, Seward said, “I didn’t get excited or upset because sometimes that’s the cost of doing business.” Another time, there was an angry parent who promised to return with a gun, after he refused to rent a car to the man’s son.
“If I got upset over every little thing that has happened to me, I would pull my hair out. ‘It happened,’ I thought to myself, ‘so let’s move on.’ Everything that can be done to a human being has been done to me,” he said.
But did depression bypass Seward because statistics show it is more likely to affect black women, who are twice as likely as black men—and 50 percent more likely than white women—to suffer from what some families label as the blues? Others, meanwhile, call it an imaginary disease.
Whatever you call it, depression stems from a sense of inner despair, Sanchez said. “When there is an inner disintegration because you are so stressed. Yet you still try to maintain the strong outer image.”
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