Once the suffering catches fire, you cant ignore it. Our relentless pandemic, cruelly paired with escalating white supremacist violence, has killed more than a million Americans . Faced with such widespread grief, many of us have noticed our mental health deteriorate in unexpected ways. If youre like me, this has also meant confronting the question-turned-grenade of self-judgment: Are you so weak and broken that you require a magic pill to put yourself back together?

In a system already built to exhaust us and make us feel disconnected from the ability to change shit, people who were already tired have been pushed to breaking points, says Shahem Mclaurin, a therapist and social worker based in New York. But the stigma is really strong when it comes to psychotropic medication being something that deems you less than.

This stigma surrounding antidepressants, and how it manifests in Black communities specifically, is why even when my own pain became so pronounced that I could no longer ignore it, I still insisted on running away from it.

I started avoiding the possibility of my depression at the onset of the 2020 lockdowns, when my mothers rare form of cancer a cancer that grew perversely in her womb like a hardheaded child revealed itself to be terminal. When I moved from New York to North Carolina to care for her, the combined stress of keeping her safe from COVID-19, relocating to another state, planning a wedding and finishing up my book made it evident that I needed to take more drastic steps to safeguard my mental health. Still, I stubbornly refused to consider medication.

At one point, I was seeing three different therapists at the same time. I turned further toward spirituality and meditation. I significantly reduced my drinking and my social media use, and invested more into deepening relationships with my family and community. All of this helped, but my mother still died, and there was still this brokenness I couldnt seem to repair.

Perhaps it just needed time, my shame told me. And so, a few months after my mothers passing, I started a new job that required me to move again, this time away from the partner Id just married. It was my dream gig, although my fantasies had somehow omitted the parts about regular 1 a.m. work nights and on-call weekends. Meanwhile, a new protest seemed to erupt every day not that my work schedule allowed me to attend because every day a new Black person, including one of my best friends earlier this year, was killed by the state. Every day, the grief and the work and the loss compounded.

My coping efforts kept me from having a full breakdown, but eventually I couldnt focus. I couldnt sleep. My anxiety got so physically intense that I felt like I might throw up if I got stuck in a prolonged conversation with someone I didnt know. If I didnt write down every task, brain fog erased it from my memory.

At the end of my rope, I finally set up a psychiatrist appointment. Even then, because Id learned to manage my most acute sadness, I was focused on feeling good enough to get work done, like the good capitalist this society encourages us all to be. I still didnt want to imagine myself with depression, so I convinced myself I might have ADHD. This avoidant misdiagnosis arose from a lack of clarity about how depression manifests.

There are so many ways depression can show up: disinterest, having a hard time getting through things, anger and irritability, anxiety, Mclaurin explains. You can miss it very easily, especially because of stigma.

Of course, the stigma against mental health treatment is prevalent in every community, but for Black people it can take certain insidious forms. Where other people can be like, Im scared Im going to lose my personality, Black people are like, Im scared that I will stop caring about my people or the struggles that we face, Mclaurin says.

In facing the monster Id made depression to be, I first had to face the fear Mclaurin alludes to: losing my connection to Black peoples pain . On top of this, I had to face the fear of utilizing a system that has been complicit in our oppression , and the fear that I was the weakest link among parents and peers who never had access to treatment and still ostensibly survived. On the other hand, if I pursued treatment and it was successful, Id have to face the possibility of leaving behind the folks in my community who didnt have access to this resource, and the survivors guilt that would accompany this.

I have a lot of Black clients who are like, I need resources. My material reality needs to be shifted, Mclaurin says. Thats real. But we cant shift these systems overnight. And we especially cant shift these systems, period, if we dont take care of ourselves.