Welcome to Community Trauma Conference UK

Introduction to the co-host, Leoni Cachia

This paper will explore how the racialised, gendered and classed experiences of Black women in the UK impacts on their mental health and wellbeing. It will focus on the social and historical context of Black women’s lives in Britain since the 1950s and the structural and systemic racism and discrimination they face that continuously assaults their health.

Black women continue to resist sexism, racism and intersectional oppression they face and pay a very heavy price, often resulting in trauma. This paper will focus on ways in which Black women’s health activism has sought to address and reduce trauma and how Black women have organised, agitated and campaigned for better mental health services.

Joyful. Graceful. Blessed. Strong. Anxious. Depressed. Stigmatised. Stereotyped.

What happens when motherhood isn't what you expected - and when you reach out for support, you are met with judgment and prejudice? Sandra Igwe shares her journey as a young Black mother, coping with sleepless nights, anxiety and loneliness after the birth of her first daughter. Burdened by cultural expectations of the 'good mother'; and the 'strong Black woman'; trope, her mental health struggles became an uphill battle. Black women are at higher risk of developing postnatal depression but are the least likely to be identified as depressed. In her recent book, she shares the voices of other mothers, and examines how culture, racism, stigma and a lack of trust in services prevent women getting the help they need. Breaking open the conversation on motherhood, race, and mental health, she demands that Black women are listened to, believed, and understood.

There is a dearth of research in the UK exploring Black African and Caribbean women’s experiences of disclosure and help- seeking following sexual violence. Much of the literature in this area derives from the USA. Although UK-based grassroots organisations that support African and Caribbean survivors have contributed significantly to what we now know, research remains limited.

This presentation therefore details the findings from a qualitative research study which employed a Black feminist framework to explore 12 Black women’s post-sexual violence disclosure and help-seeking experiences. The findings reflected in the narratives highlight the complexities around silence, speaking, and being heard that Black women may face as they navigate the aftermath of sexual violence.

Group analysis is a psychotherapeutic modality privileging how social and political systems produce and maintain people’s emotional distress and ‘disturbance’. Creating a microcosm of society, groups enable details of individual struggles and problematic relationships to emerge for examination and ultimately, reparation. This occurs through emotional and interpersonal processes that take place between group members and the conductor over time. Empirical analysis within a number of group roles suggests that when Black women are the minority in analytic groups, their/our racial trauma can be rapidly and effectively reproduced.

Unfortunately, limited capacity for offering reparation has been observed. Instead, the dynamics of racial trauma can become concretized, leading to continuous re-traumatisation, risking internalisation of toxic self-representations. It will be explained how and why Black women are particularly vulnerable to repetitions of racial trauma within analytic groups. A proposed, reparative, bespoke model of group analysis designed especially for Black women will be presented.