Customer Reviews

Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans

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The most valuable aspect of this book for me is the perspective of the author about her brother's suicide and how it effected her. That's unique and only she can tell us about that.

Anyone who uses Google can readily discover statistical evidence demonstrating that Blacks are committing suicide far more often now than we did forty years ago. Having read many scholarly articles and National Institute of Health reports about suicide, I did not find that I learned substantially more through this book.

Nonetheless, I have only the deepest respect for its authors and I hope the Black perspective they bring to the topic will help caregivers keep Black patients safer and provide therapy more effectively; help Black families escape denial to confront reality when a member of the family is considering suicide; and even help people considering suicide to realize that they are not alone in their anguish.

A book that offers those benefits is well worth offering to those who might be helped.

My mother died by suicide when I was 9 years old. What I find most amazing till this day is how my family (we are African-American) refused to talk about her mental illness and the circumstances that lead to her death. For years, I would rather lie about her death and her illness, than admit that she was mentally ill.

This book takes the blinders off an issue that we don't like to talk about in the black community. How many times have we heard comedians joke about mental health issues being a "white man's disease". But the truth is that mental illness affects people of all classes, ethnic backgrounds and religion. It can especially hit the poor very hard due to insufficient access to health care. With necessary information, statistics and a very objective approach, the authors of this great book show how mental illness is more of a problem than we would like to think, and yet "age old stigmas" (especially the one that associates mental illness with being crazy) make it hard for us to seek the treatment that we need. Of course, there are other issues that are addressed, such as the insensitivity of the health care community towards the health care needs of African-Americans.

This book is a must read for anyone sinmcerly concerned about the overall health of the African-American community and our society as a whole

Everyone in the Afro American community needs to read this book.

It's has helped me cope with the death of my son.

It also addresses the slow suicide of drug, alcohol & sex addiction afflicting our most important resource; our youth.

A grieving mother.

I work with people with mental illness and substance abuse. I have shared this book with many of my African American clients and everytime I do I get such positive reinforcement that the authors of this book have given them their dignity back. It has answered ages old questions about the the black experience that everyone should know. This book should be a must read for all our children.

This book is a classic example of how inconvenient facts can be ignored in order to support a thesis which promotes a political agenda instead of actually examining the data available to reach a proper conclusion. Is there a suicide and mental health crisis among African-Americans? If you read this book, it is beyond repute. Is it caused by the racism that the authors find under every rock? Absolutely, according to them. Do the authors look at historical facts that refute their premise? Absolutely not.
Was racism in the US more prevalent in the Jim Crow era than today? Well, ask the Tuskegee airmen, or any other totally segregated (but supposedly equal) segment of society who had to drink from a "colored" water fountain or attend inferior schools. What were the differences in mental health statistics between racial groups in that era when it came to looking at white vs. black groups of similar economic circumstances? Whites were disproportionately represented then. Will you find that information in this book? Absolutely not.
So what has changed? Publishers are willing to put books like this into the marketplace without anyone challenging the total lack of foundation for their conclusions and demanding real research instead of selective and highly slanted statistics that do not hold up in the light of day.
Of course the fact that this book is in the near 400,000 level of sales vs. serious academic research such as The Bell Curve at 6500 says a lot. But this book is essentially a politically correct and academically fraudulent exercise. If you are into victimhood and excusing the failure of the leaders of today's civil rights movement to rise above the shoe leather of giants like Martin Luther King Jr., you will like this book. If you are looking for serious examination of the many crises facing the black community today and how to deal with them, you won't find it here.