Actor Courtney B. Vance and Dr. Robin L. Smith Center Black Men’s Mental Health In Their Book ‘The Invisible Ache’

Give Black Alliance May is National Mental Health Awareness Month, and renowned actor Courtney B. Vance and award-winning psychologist Dr. Robin L. Smith have co-authored the book “The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power.” With their book, they seek to raise awareness about Black men and mental health. Given recent trends, this issue is more important than ever. For the first time ever, the suicide rate among Blacks is higher than among whites. These so-called “deaths of despair,” which include suicide, alcohol use, and drug overdoses, have tripled between 2013 and 2022. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black men are four times more likely to die from suicide than Black women. “There is an African proverb we use in the book that says ‘The lion’s story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it.’  So what we are doing in “The Invisible Ache” is making sure that the lions – Black men and boys – are narrating and reclaiming their own stories,” Smith told ESSENCE. “We want to get to a point where it is normalized to not only ask, do you hurt or...