By Lincoln DePradine

Psychotherapist Claire Kirk is a veteran social worker who remembers  when culturally appropriate services for people of African descent were difficult to access in Toronto. She also is cognizant of the historical hesitancy on the part of Black people to seek professional help for issues such as depression and anxiety.

Kirk notes, with delight, that there’s been a positive improvement, both in relation to the availability of services and in the willingness of Black people to receive professional assistance.

“There’s a lot of help out there. Now, we have resources and spaces to talk,’’ said Kirk, who was addressing an online mental health event organized by the City of Brampton.

March is being observed as “Black Mental Health Awareness Month’’ in Brampton and as part of the observance, the city’s Economic Empowerment and Anti-Black Racism Unit has been hosting a series of virtual “community sessions’’ on mental health.

The sessions are about having “honest conversations on mental health and wellbeing and its impact on the Black community’’, and to “encourage more meaningful action in the fight against anti-Black racism’’, said Gwyneth Matthew Chapman, senior advisor in the Economic Empowerment and Anti-Black Racism Unit.

“Racism and oppressive experiences’’ have compounded the problems facing members of the Black community, Kirk told a recent session on “Youth Mental Health’’.

Shantay Parsons, a young creative strategist, said she has founded an organization called the “Black Creative Alliances’’ – for people 16 to 30 years of age – as a “healing incubator and a space for conversation’’.

 “That kind of comes from my experience,’’ she said. “I never had a space to speak. We need to start normalizing those conversations. In the Black community, we just have to feel safe speaking with one another.’’

Kirk, a family counsellor and member of both the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association and the American Psychotherapy Association, said in the early years of her work in Toronto’s Jane and Finch community, social workers like her were frustrated at their inability to secure system changes to better serve Black Canadians.

“You were not at the table. You didn’t have a voice; you couldn’t do anything. So, there was a lot of frustration,’’ she said.

“Our people, in seeking help, they would deem us as ill. You know what the illness was? It was racism. It was the frustration of trying to be heard, trying to have access, and constantly being denied.’’

Kirk, who left to work in the United States, is now  in private practice and is also a counsellor at Delta Family Resource Centre, a grassroots, non-profit agency providing a range of programs and services to “enhance individual skills’’ and to promote healthy communities.

She also operates the AfriCaribbean Canadian Family Advocacy Centre, a not-for-profit “committed to the delivery of services through a trauma-informed, culturally responsive, anti-oppressive and anti-Black racism framework’’.

“I am excited that now, since coming back from the US, I’m serving our community here. And, my clients now look like me,’’ said Kirk.

“When I started this, I didn’t get any Black clients. It was not okay, apparently, to go and sit with a therapist,’’ she added. “I would say 95 per cent of my clients look like me and I’ve been waiting 20 years for this to happen. So, let’s talk.’’

Black Canadians must find ways to “heal’’, Kirk said, “because what we’re really talking about is generational trauma. It gets replayed and replayed and replayed in the community; sometimes at home, a lot of times at work’’.