Taraji P. Henson Wants to Know What's on Your Mind
“The first thing we wanted to do was get Black people talking about mental health,” Taraji P. Henson says. “Let’s just get it out there. I’ll say something. I’ll break the ice.”
That’s just what she’s done. Since founding in 2018 the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation (named after her father, a Vietnam War veteran who struggled with both post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder), Henson—who won a Golden Globe for her role as Cookie Lyon on the TV series Empire, having earlier earned an Oscar nomination for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—has been a tireless advocate for addressing mental health in the Black community. And never have such efforts been so necessary; according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, more than 17 percent of non-Hispanic Black adults in the United States struggle with mental illness, including depression and anxiety.
In the last year a global pandemic and catastrophic racial reckoning shook the United States to its core and pushed Black America to the brink. I’m speaking to Henson on the first day of Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd; two weeks later Daunte Wright would be shot and killed by the police in a suburb of Minneapolis, just 10 miles north of the courthouse where the Chauvin trial was being held. The numbers are staggering but not surprising in light of the way issues of race, wealth, and health inequity have been exacerbated in the past year. If that isn’t enough, there are issues within the community that stigmatize mental health due to religious beliefs, lack of information, criminalization, and medical mistrust.
Through her foundation, a nonprofit that raises money via grants, donations, and events, including a gala, Henson is providing free therapy sessions, funding scholarships for Black students who want to pursue careers in the mental health field, and hosting a Facebook program, “Peace of Mind with Taraji,” which offers viewers an opportunity to learn more about mental illness, see what a therapy session looks like in real time, and hear testimonies from such celebrities as Gabrielle Union and Mary J. Blige. Henson’s work is an intervention for the Black community in the hope of creating healing, survival, and joy.
She has also been active in trying to change the system from the inside. In 2019 Henson testified in front of the Congressional Black Caucus Emergency Task Force on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health, saying, “I want to use my celebrity and my voice to put a face to this. This is a national crisis.” Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman applauded her efforts, saying, “We can do the legislative piece…but it is a voice like yours that helps to elevate the discussion so that the people will react to it.”
Here, Henson talks with T&C from her home in Los Angeles about addressing the stigmas around mental health, finding her footing as a philanthropist, and what real change will look like.
What inspired you to create a foundation that would support Black people’s mental health and wellness?
Taraji P. Henson: I was struggling. My son was struggling, and I was trying to find help. It was difficult looking for someone culturally competent or who looks like us so we could feel safe. I was frustrated, and I called Tracie Jade Jenkins, who now runs my foundation. I’ve known her since the seventh grade, and she has suffered from anxiety her entire life. We struck up a conversation, and I was like, “This is amazing.” You know, I can afford [therapy], but just imagine all the millions of Black people who can’t afford it.
Then I started thinking even further. The reason we don’t have many culturally competent therapists or therapists of color is because we don’t talk about it at home. My children don’t even know it’s possible to study this field in college. Something has to happen—we’ve got to talk about it and make some changes.
You had never founded a nonprofit before. Who was a model for you in terms of becoming a philanthropist?
Alicia Keys and Keep a Child Alive. I’m an ambassador, and if I sign my name to anything, I’m not just going to sign my name. I went to South Africa, I made sure that I met the woman who runs the organization there. I saw the work being done with children and how she was saving these babies whose parents were wiped out because of AIDS and being raised by their grandparents. I saw the work.
Your show, “Peace of Mind with Taraji,” is radical in addressing mental health issues in the Black community by incorporating celebrities, real people, and actual therapists.
Our mission was to clear up any misconceptions of what mental health [issues] are like. With PTSD, a lot of people think, Oh, I didn’t go to war, I don’t suffer from that. But most people suffer from PTSD, especially today watching the news—seeing George Floyd get murdered on television and watching it over and over. We needed to make people understand that there are layers to this and put faces to it.
The show offers people a look into the process of therapy.
A mission for the show is for people to see what [therapy] looks like. You laugh, you cry, you have a therapist come in to give you some tools and exercises to do. We talk about our resource guide, and we direct the audience to it if they’re suffering. This is a place where you can heal, and we show what it looks like. Tracie and I are very vulnerable; there’s my personal stuff, and she shares personal things, and that’s what therapy looks like, right? It’s not some daunting, scary place.
You’ve got to think about therapy like a relationship; there has to be a vibe. My therapist is Black, and she’s younger than me. I see myself in her. She gets my mind because she’s a Virgo. She knows how I think.
What does the face of Black mental health look like in America?
When we started the foundation, the more we did research the more statistics affected me. Our children are also in a pipeline from schools straight to prison. They’re suffering from traumatic situations at home, even in school. When I was a teacher in [the L.A. neighborhood of] Crenshaw, I was teaching special education kids, but I was also in the middle of a pipeline to prison. They were all Black boys, and the system was set up to fail them. What if I didn’t choose special ed? I might have never encountered these kids for whom shootouts and shell casings in the wall are normalized. The pain is what we have been normalizing. Having a Black son, it was just so much.
Black men and boys face myriad societal challenges that affect their mental health, including racial bias, police brutality, health disparities, and generational trauma. How does this affect them?
They have to be the strongest, and they aren’t allowed to be vulnerable. If I’m to be in a relationship with a Black man, how is that going to work if he’ll never show me his vulnerability? Where’s the balance there? Black men are suffering. Look at how the world treats them. And then Covid hit, and we had to find the power to switch the narrative. Look at how many people—Black people, people of color—we were able to help during this pandemic. What I learned about men is that men need to be nurtured and singled out, because they often just don’t feel heard.
Black women also face specific obstacles when it comes to mental health and overall wellness. What have you learned from your therapy journey and the foundation’s work?
The more research I did—and [looking at] my own sessions—I started thinking about us as a culture, because we have learned to normalize so much trauma since slavery—since slavery. That’s in our blood, that’s innately in us to be strong.
We have to take the veil off of that for the strong Black woman. I understand why we needed that, because we’re always at the bottom of the totem pole, and we need to feel validated. That’s the thing about Black people: Joy is our freedom. We will always tap into that. But then people can take that and manipulate it. They think, Oh, a Black woman, she’s strong, she doesn’t need medicine. So she ends up dying in the emergency room or dying giving birth. It’s deep for us.
What does change look like?
Legislation, legislation, legislation. Cops have got to stop showing up to situations where someone’s having a manic moment, especially when it’s us, because there’s no empathy when it comes to us. When we go to jail, where’s the empathy? You’re going to put me in jail for a disease that I didn’t ask for. That’s like criminalizing me for the color of my skin.
This story appears in the Summer 2021 issue of Town & Country.
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