It is widely assumed that when a person reaches out for assistance, they have already gone through the toughest part of their journey. The declaration of “I’m struggling” is treated as the deepest threshold, and once it is crossed, support is simply there. However, this is not the case for many people of colour. The battle only begins when they ask for help. Their ordeal then goes through the waiting room, the intake form, the first conversation, the assessing look in the other person’s eyes as they try to figure out what kind of pain you are suffering. In these first moments, healing becomes something that you must demonstrate rather than something that you can simply receive.
At first, this was a lesson that I learned very gradually. Not through the medium of academic terminology or reports, but rather through the slow, subtle moments that show how care is not equally received. It is often the opposite of dramatic and loud. It does not always identify itself as injustice. Sometimes it is a pause, a question, a tone, a doubt, something that you sense but cannot always put into words. Yet it influences everything.
Someone I know and care for, let’s call him B, possesses a soft-spoken quality that tends to make others underestimate the weight of his silences. For weeks, he was in a fight with his thoughts: heavy, restless ones which the nights would not remove, the days still felt to him like an unstructured and airless prison. He was not in a crisis, exactly. But he was on the brink of something that none of us wanted him to go through alone. Eventually, he agreed to go for a consultation. I recall sitting next to him in the waiting area of a community mental health service, with fluorescent lights buzzing quietly above us, and the kind of quiet that feels more like a staged performance than peaceful. He was there with his slight body posture leaning forward, not at all tense but tightly controlled. Then he spoke out so softly that it seemed as if the sound was his last breath: “Do you think they would really take me for a fool?”
Not help me.
Not listen to me.
Just believe me.
That particular question has never left my mind. It was not only about him. It was about the common burden of the unacknowledged, the burden of being the wrongly understood, the wrongly read, and the wrongly called. Pain in Black or Brown people, more severely hurt and less sensitively treated, is nonetheless still very hard for the majority to see through their own false lenses: anger instead of mourning, resistance instead of exhaustion, and silence instead of being overwhelmed. What some communities express silently is expected to be loud. What is shown with calmness is misunderstood as coping. And what appears to be toughness is sometimes just survival in a world that requires us to always be calm.
B, in that waiting room, was not only getting ready to communicate verbally. He was also getting ready for the interpretation.
People of color, particularly those who are racialized, face a certain burden while seeking mental health support: the burden to explain. The burden of making one’s feelings understandable to a person who is culturally different and has a different framework from yours. A large portion of us have been brought up in families and communities where emotions are manifested in different ways through food, prayer, storytelling, music, shared silence, and routine; through care that does not necessarily match what the services recognise. Thus, if emotional distress comes out as retreat, stillness, or silence, then maybe it is coded very lightly; it might get lost. It might remain unnoticed.
This is the very point where racial bias takes place, albeit quietly. Not necessarily through direct hatred but through the concept of what distress is “supposed” to look like. It is present in cases where some people’s pain is immediately recognised, while others are subjected to a sort of gauging against strange expectations. No one suffers equally if it is a condition to prove to the other that your pain is real.
Finally, B was called in for the session. After coming out, he said that he felt like he had been “presenting evidence.” The support was there: someone listened, someone reacted, but he still had to mould his narrative according to what the service comprehended. And this act of moulding is truly exhausting. It makes healing seem like a conditional process. It makes care feel like a reward you have to quest for.
Let me put it very simply: this is not a critique of mental health practitioners. Actually, a lot of them are really trying hard and doing their best in the systems that have already been stretched too thin. A lot of them really want to know the case and be better, too. But the problem is structural; it is already embedded in the training models, diagnostic frameworks, and the cultural assumptions regarding emotions and their visibility.
When healing is based on one comprehension of distress, one language, one emotional pattern, one cultural norm, the people outside that pattern will have to put in more effort to be part of the process. This is why so many people from racialised minorities rely on community care as a first option. Not because professional support is replaced but because community care provides something that is too often missed in a clinical environment: immediate recognition. The comfort of not having to interpret oneself. The relief of not having to demonstrate one’s struggle. The safety of being accepted without having to clarify the mode one’s feelings are taking.
Community care is not without its flaws, yet it has an understanding of us. It is acquainted with the silent mourning, the humour as a defence, the way we sometimes say “I’m fine” when we mean “I’m bearing too much.” It knows the weight that comes with the overlapping of one’s identity, history, migration, belonging, and surviving.
Mental health professionals could draw a lesson from this not by an attempt to mimic community care but by the recognition that emotional expression is culturally influenced. Through the training of empathetic listening without making assumptions. By acknowledging that the manner of pain presentation is as diverse as the individuals who suffer from it. Even if two people go through the same healing process, the outcome won’t be equal if one begins with more barriers, bias, or disbelief.
If they want to be truly accessible, compassionate, and healing, mental health services must learn to sit with their discomfort, the discomfort of not immediately understanding someone — to listen, to learn, and to let people show them what their suffering feels like, instead of measuring it against a pre-set scale. Belief in the person speaking first leads to equal healing. It means acknowledging that a person like B should not have to ask the question, “will they believe me?” ever again.