Well, knock me over with a feather. I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked.
A solemn group stood in the shadow of the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, forming a circle on the snow-caked sidewalk. MarShawn McCarrel, 23, a well-known Black Lives Matter activist, had taken his own life on the statehouse steps. Now his friends had come together in his memory.
As evening turned to night last week, protest organizer Rashida Davidson, 25, recounted the personal toll of two years of activism: Trouble sleeping. Bouts of anxiety. Feelings of despair.
“This is really getting to us,” Davidson said. “And if MarShawn’s death does not show that… I don’t know what else we need to tell or show to say that this is really going on.”
Since he died early last week, news of McCarrel’s suicide has rocked the national police protest movement, forcing a round of introspection about a reality that predates the seminal 2014 shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.: Some of the most prominent activists and organizers are battling not only the system, but depression.
In Oakland, Calif., a prominent activist posted the phone number for a suicide prevention hotline on her Facebook page. In Cleveland, a lead organizer confessed on Facebook that he, too, had tried to take his own life. Dozens of others have shared stories of their battles with depression, anxiety and insecurity on Twitter.
“In the movement you’re just constantly engaging in black death, seeing the communal impact,” said Jonathan Butler, the University of Missouri graduate student whose hunger strike last fall led to the resignation of the school’s president. “You’re being faced with the reality that I’m more likely to be killed by the police, that I’m being discriminated against. You start to see all of the micro-aggressions.”
Like many prominent activists, Butler said he has long struggled with depression, beginning with the death of his grandfather in 2011. His involvement with the protest movement at times has worsened his mental health, he said, not only because of the emotional strain of a single-minded focus on racism, but also because of more mundane stresses, such as media scrutiny and infighting among allies.
“So many people glamorize the visibility that comes with being in these spotlights,” Butler said. “And they’re not seeing the pressures.”
…Studies have found that black Americans are more susceptible to depression and anxiety — a disparity that health experts believe stems from social stigma and a lack of access to mental health resources in black communities, as well as a reluctance to take advantage of those resources when they are available.
“It’s really tough in the black community because we’re going uphill trying to fight all of these negative stereotypes about us, and the last thing a lot of black people want to do is give people one more reason to look down on us,” said Monnica Williams, director of the Center for Mental Health Disparities at the University of Louisville. “I think a lot of African Americans are walking around depressed, coping from day to day, and not really living.”
A study by the federal Office of Minority Health found that African Americans are 20 percent more likely to experience serious mental health problems than the general population. And for an activist, Williams said, depression can be especially dangerous. Much of the conversation about race and justice occurs online, where harsh and threatening messages are abundant…
“There are so many folks in this movement that have serious mental health issues,” said Alexis Templeton, who is among the most prominent organizers in St. Louis. “There are so many folks who are on the brink of killing themselves.”
When she first joined the protests in 2014, Templeton was one of those people. A year earlier, she had been a passenger in a deadly car crash that killed her father, uncle and partner. Her guilt about surviving was often hard to bear, she said, and there were many days when she sat in her room with a loaded gun to her head.
