Black Women's Lives, Mental Health and Liberation Matters

Background and Purpose: Many college students face additional personal, social, academic, and vocational concerns during their matriculation that requires them to navigate developmental tasks, focusing on emotional adjustment, interpersonal relationships and academic concerns. Black college women often experience compounding stressful daily life events, such as gender and racial discrimination and feelings of isolation due to their minority status. These distinct challenges add a layer of complexity to the psychological and social adjustment of Black college women. The field of college mental health is faced with the critical task of providing culturally-relevant services that meet the complex psychological needs of their growing Black student populations. The current literature suggests that to enhance mental health treatment outcomes for Black college women, programs must be culturally-relevant and include subsidiary services (i.e., ethnic and linguistic matching, schedule flexibility, extended sessions, peer support networks) that are more helpful than standard college counseling programs. The authors present data from an innovative intervention, grounded in Black feminst Therapy entitled “Claiming Your Connections,” aimed at reducing stress and enhancing psychosocial competence among Black women.

Methods:This study used an experimental design, composed of an intervention and a comparison group with pretest and posttest measures to study the effectiveness of the CYC group intervention among 96 Black women within the Northeast and Southeast regions of the United States.