Between 2018 and 2022, the suicide rate among Black youth rose by more than 50 percent, surpassing the rate among white youth for the first time. While overall youth suicide rates have declined, the rate for Black Americans climbed. This means something is not working and the prescription we have been handed for so long is not working.
In December 2021, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a rare public health advisory warning that young people were facing a mental health crisis that the pandemic had dramatically exacerbated. That alarm has echoed ever since. Yet as policymakers debate funding and clinicians scramble for solutions, Black families are being offered the same things that have failed us for decades: more therapy referrals to providers who don’t look like us, more hotlines in languages that don’t speak to our experience, and more clinical frameworks built on cultural erasure.
We are being rerouted, delayed and abandoned. The data is beginning to confirm what our grandmothers always knew: ancestral healing is not an alternative to public health; it is public health.
I am a public health researcher, an ancestral healing practitioner, and a Black woman who has spent more than two decades at the intersection of science and spirit. Ancestral healing is the practice of reconnecting to the traditions, wisdom, and spiritual legacies of those who came before us and using that connection as medicine for the mind, body, and community.
Epigenetics has shown us that trauma does not die with the person who experienced it. It is written into the body and transmitted across generations. Centuries of enslavement, segregation, and systemic racism have left a biological imprint. The descendants of people who were not permitted to be fully human now carry that history in their nervous systems, immune responses, and their children’s bodies.
No amount of cognitive behavioral therapy addresses what was written into the DNA across generations.That generational trauma is compounded by the trauma Black Americans endure today. Research from Harvard School of Public Health, drawing on a nationally representative sample of more than 34,000 adults, found that Black Americans experienced trauma types most likely to produce lasting psychological harm, including significantly higher rates of assaultive violence and childhood maltreatment compared to white Americans.
A related study found that nearly 65% of Black American youth report traumatic experiences, compared to 30% of their peers from other racial and ethnic groups. Proper treatment must also be culturally competent. When Black youth obtain care, they often encounter providers not trained to recognize that depression in a Black child may look like anger, that silence may be self-protection, and that hypervigilance may be inherited wisdom.
There are more effective ways to help our children. A landmark review published in the “Annual Review of Clinical Psychology” examined decades of research on African American youth mental health and arrived at a striking conclusion: ethnic and racial identity, racial socialization, spirituality, and connection to cultural community function as measurable protective factors against the mental health harms of racism. Studies showed that positive racial attitudes significantly buffered the negative effects of chronic exposure to community violence, and that higher cultural regard reduced the impact of discrimination on depressive symptoms. Knowing who you are and where you come from is not just a feel-good addition to treatment. The science shows it is treatment.
To be clear: I am not asking us to choose between the clinic and the community altar. I am not asking Black families to abandon therapy for ritual, or to distrust medical science in favor of spiritual practice. The either/or framing is itself a product of the same colonial thinking that stripped our ancestors of their healing traditions in the first place. What I am asking is that we stop pretending that a healing system built without us, can save us. We need both. And we must insist that both be taken seriously, as well as that both are funded, studied, and integrated.
If we are serious about Black youth mental health, we must invest in culturally grounded healing frameworks as legitimate public health infrastructure. Fund them. Study them. Integrate them.
Our children are not broken. They are burdened; by history, by systems, by a culture that has asked them to perform resilience while denying them the roots that make resilience possible. Ancestral healing returns those roots. It says to a Black child: you come from people who survived the unsurvivable. You carry their strength. You are not alone in your body, and indeed you never were.
Dr. Arletha D. Lizana, PhD, MPH, MBA is is a Public Voices Fellow on Youth Well-Being and Power with The OpEd Project and Hopelab.
