A Change Of Heart

By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer As a community-minded health care provider, Aron King is used to disseminating information to the public. King furthered that outreach by co-creating the Barbershop Project, which raised awareness of Black men’s health matters. He and fellow nurse Carter Todd created programs that engaged men on a variety of subjects like hypertension and diabetes. There was one topic, however, that rendered him silent: mental health. “Carter and I had been doing videos on aspects of men’s health, focusing mostly on gun violence and we had a couple other topics we talked about like COVID-19,” King says. “There was a small segment on mental health, but I was never really comfortable with the topic of mental health, so it was never something I would speak on.” Being in medicine, it was normal for King to hear about the benefits of therapy, but he never saw it as something he needed, because he “wasn’t ill.” & “I didn’t really understand it,” he admits. “I looked at it as there are people who could deal with stress or deal with things and others that couldn’t. I never really thought of it as something that you had...