The Intersection of Blackness, Police Brutality, and a Mental Health Crisis

On March 1st, my family and family friends experienced something that would change our lives forever. On March 1st, my mom attempted suicide. I knew that experiences like this could be traumatic for the people around the survivor, but I did not know that the intersection of past racial trauma could make it even worse. Ever since the George Floyd incident, I have been more hypervigilant of racism and racial bias around me and police brutality in general. I have read many cases of black people and non-black people experiencing police brutality during a mental health crisis. So, when I found myself in a predominantly white suburb being required to call the police in order to ensure my mom’s safety, it felt somewhat counterintuitive.

Overall, I never knew how traumatic experiencing someone else’s attempt could be, especially when it is your parent and you’re a teenage child. In order to understand the impact of what happened to me, I think it is important to have a little bit of context. The main reason for my mom’s attempt stemmed from an ongoing hostile work environment brought on by disability discrimination and ineffective HR and management. Previously in January, there was a high probability of me having to switch to online homeschooling in order to get my sister on the bus because my mom’s boss was being very inflexible in terms of family-work life balance. As a current high school senior at the time, this was one of the worst possibilities because it would mean that I would not be able to graduate with my class and would never see my friends and teachers again. Even though a solution was devised to avoid this, I did a lot of pre-prepared grieving in anticipation, so entering March I was very much still on high alert.

My mom has had depression since I was a little kid, around 6 years old. I remember the first time she went into inpatient treatment. I was 6 years old and at this time, I was an only child, and my mom was a single mother. This meant that everything I did was done with my mom and there was never a day that I did not see her. One day, my mom’s friend picked me up and told me that I would be staying with her for a few days. A few days ended up being a whole week. I was very overwhelmed because I had to stay at a house I had never been before, eat meals I had never eaten with people I did not know very well, and my mom’s friend would not tell me where my mom was or when she would be back. At 6 years old, that is a lot of uncertainty and I still wonder how much of that experience translates into the generalized anxiety disorder I have now. I did not find out that the reason my mom had been gone was because she was in inpatient mental health treatment until I was around 11 years old.

Because my mom is a single mother working 3 jobs, naturally I was already the caretaker of the house. However, when depression strikes, my job duties would increase tenfold. There have been times that I have witnessed my mom have intense depressive episodes. During most depressive episodes, she would openly express that she did not want to live anymore and that the only reason why she was living was for my sister and me. She would always make jokes about how she was going to kill herself. At some point I learned the difference between passive and active suicidal ideation. From all the suicidal ideation she had demonstrated, it had always seemed passive. Looking back in hindsight, the language my mom used an hour before the attempt was more hopeless and distraught than usual, but I could not really determine that at the moment. At the time, I thought that she was being her usual passively suicidal self. It did not concern me when she went into her room and locked her door because she does this all the time during depressive episodes. When my dad and my sister’s dad called me to tell me they received concerning texts from my mom and to check to see if she was okay, I still was not concerned because she had always texted our fathers during depressive episodes telling them that she was going to send us to live with them even though this never happened. I do not know what the contents of the message that our fathers received were, but I do know that the same message was sent to all my mom’s friends because suddenly I started getting an influx of texts. My dad called me, convincing me that this may be more serious than I thought, and told me to check on my mom. When I told him that the door was locked, he instructed me to get into the room at any cost or we would need to call the police. I spend 10 minutes frantically trying to unlock the door. Once it was clear that I could not open the door, my dad told me to call the police. I was absolutely terrified. I was scared because my mom had always said that if I called the police on her for any reason, my sister and I would go into foster care. I was scared because I knew she would be mad at me for calling. I was scared because I had never called the police. The last police encounter I had was during a supposed mental health crisis of my own five years earlier, one that was extremely traumatizing.

I did manage to call the police. However, I still feel a lot of guilt for my severe reluctance to do so and the way I went about the call. I portrayed the situation to be a lot more minor than it was, saying that she was unresponsive behind a locked door and had been experiencing distress at work that made me concerned for her safety. Even my sister that is seven years younger than me pointed out my lack of usage of the terms suicidal and potential suicide attempt. I do not know if I were concerned that me using those words would cause more people to come or more drastic measures to take place or if I was at that moment confronted with my own internal mental health stigma that I didn’t realize I still had. Either way, the guilt remains. Luckily, my sister’s dad and my godmother had already called the police before I did, giving the details I did not. Sometimes I wonder if I had been the only one who called if they would have taken longer to get there and if that would have resulted in my mom’s death.

About 5 minutes after I called the police and had called my dad back, my mom opened the door and asked why there was so much noise going on. I immediately got scared as in my head, there was no reason for me to have called the police because she was ok now. I told her that we called the police, and she was still kind of disoriented because she was waking up from a nap. She went to lay back down but was very agitated. When the police came, it was initially a white man and an Indian man. I was initially happy because there was at least one person of color, and it was only two people. I thought they would do a check up and leave. Then, more people started showing up: several more police officers, several paramedics, and several firefighters. All of them were white except for the one Indian man. As a black person, I suddenly became terrified, as a swarm of white people and white police officers with guns in their holsters were making their way up the stairs. I had told all the info to the Indian police officer and had to repeat it to a blonde female police officer later. There were about 4 paramedics, 2 firefighters, and 4 police officers in my mom’s room. At first, they were asking if she took anything. My mom said no but they found an empty pill bottle and a note. They started rummaging through her things to find more pills. My mom was extremely agitated and kept yelling at them to get out of her room. They told me that if my mom did not come willingly on the stretcher downstairs, that they would have to restrain her. My mother is a proud black woman who is very dignified. I knew that she was not going to let herself be restrained for any reason and that she would fight back. I desperately tried to convince her to come downstairs. She kept yelling at me and saying that this was all my fault and threatened to not pay for my college tuition.

Eventually, I started sobbing in my room. All I could see in my head was the paramedics trying to restrain my mom, her fighting back, the police officers drawing their guns, and my mom shot dead on the floor. This is a very disturbing image to be imagining, and this was directly related to the fear of police brutality that I have and the many incidents of police brutality in mental health crises that I had read about. Luckily, it did not get this far because my mom managed to walk downstairs and get on the stretcher. I had asked the paramedics to back up the truck to the front porch and put a towel on my mom so that my mom was not upset by the neighbors seeing her. Once they told me where my mom was going, the police officers and paramedics started to leave. I was extremely hyper vigilant. While leaving, I saw the blonde female police officer and another male police officer laughing in my front yard. In addition, other officers were smiling outside. I felt immediately violated. My mom just tried to kill herself and you are laughing in my front yard? The insensitivity shook me to my core even more than the neighbor pretending to check the mail to see what was happening did.

For the next few days until my sister’s dad could get there, I watched my sister and dog at home. On the second day, I was able to call my mom and she was a lot more calm. However, my anxiety heightened when she told me that because she didn’t have her phone, I needed to text her friends and family to tell them what happened. I am not close with the majority of family members, and I don’t know her friends, so this was extremely uncomfortable for me. I think that the internalized mental health stigma came back because once again, I attempted to phrase the situation in the most sugar-coated way. My mom was angry at my refusal to be truthful and demanded that I send a text that read, “On Tuesday, my mom overdosed on pills in a suicide attempt. She is still currently in the hospital but hopes to be discharged in a couple of days.”

Then, an influx of texts kept coming asking when she’d be home, if she was ok, and if I was ok — all questions I had no clear answers to. Over the next few weeks, things settled down as she came home, and family came from North Carolina to visit. Now, my mom has a new job, and we are in the process of moving. She still has depression, but I’d like to believe that as a collective, we are all getting better at managing it. Lastly, I reflect on the suicide note. I kept it in her bathroom for a while. I remember reading it over and over trying to parse out some secret meaning or code. I felt like there had to be something more to it because it seemed so plain and vague. Or maybe rash? I don’t know, but what I do know is that this situation enlightened me to some potential weakness in my character that I know now I need to work on. In the past, someone I knew from school was exhibiting signs of suicidal ideation. I brushed it off because I knew she had friends, so I figured one of them would say something at some point. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but 8 months later she was in the hospital for a suicide attempt and I couldn’t help thinking it was my fault. The parallels between that situation and my mom’s are that I have a tendency to retreat in fear when it comes to discussing matters of suicide. This is very hypocritical given that I consider myself to be a mental illness advocate who prioritizes communication in assisting someone who is suicidal over everything else. I tell people not to be afraid to have these scary conversations, but I can’t even have them myself. I also learned that I am quite stoic in a crisis. I cried over the fear of police brutality but not because of anything else. I compartmentalized my stress and upset and went to school the next day. My dad kept telling me that whatever I felt was ok. For me, the issue was that I didn’t feel anything. Till this day, I still don’t really have much emotional attachment to this event other than the anger at the laughing officers. I’m sure over time I will develop language to help better describe my feelings, but until then I just take it day by day.