Holding Ourselves, Healing Together: A Mental Health Reflection on 2025

Sojourner’s Truth
Bernadette Joy Graham, MA, LPCC, LLC

A Mental Health Moment

By Bernadette Joy Graham, MA, LPCC

Licensed Clinical Mental Health Therapist

As 2025 draws to a close, many of us in the Black community are carrying both pride and exhaustion. We have weathered a year of continued economic pressures, widening health disparities, community violence, political tension, and the ever-present demand to stay resilient even when we’re weary. Yet despite these challenges, we remain here—still building, still loving, still fighting, and still dreaming.

As a licensed clinical mental health therapist, I have witnessed firsthand the emotional weight that many of us have been carrying silently. And I’ve also witnessed something else: our growing willingness to talk openly about mental health, to reach out for help, and to prioritize our well-being in ways that past generations were not always able to. That shift is powerful. It is cultural change in real time.

2025: A Year That Tested Us

This year brought multiple stressors that disproportionately affected Black individuals and families:

  • Economic instability that left many juggling multiple jobs, rising living costs, and persistent financial anxiety.
    • Continued racialized stress, from national headlines to workplace dynamics, that re-open the wounds of       generations.
    • Community violence that has left too many grieving, hypervigilant, or living in a state of quiet fear.
    • Persistent health disparities, especially in mental and emotional health access, treatment, and support.
    • The ongoing pressure to “be strong,” even when our nervous systems are begging for rest.

These challenges do not exist in isolation; they impact our bodies, minds, families, and futures. And while we continue to show unmatched resilience, we must no longer confuse survival with wellness.

Ending the Year With Intention, Not Just Endurance

As we close out 2025, take a mental health moment and I invite our community to reflect with honesty and compassion:

  • What did we survive this year that we never want to normalize?
  • What pain have we been carrying without giving ourselves permission to feel it?
  • Where have we been silent, simply because we didn’t feel safe speaking up?
  • What would it look like to choose rest—not as a reward, but as a right?

Mental health is not just an individual concern. It is a collective one. We heal in community. And we hurt in community as well.

The Importance of Mental Health Moving Forward

In 2026, our community will continue to face challenges, but we can also enter the year with a renewed commitment to protect our mental and emotional well-being:

  1. Normalize therapy and support.
    Seeking mental health care is not a sign of weakness—it is a declaration of value.
  2. Prioritize rest and nervous system health.
    Rest is one of the most revolutionary acts we can choose in a world that profits from our exhaustion.
  3. Strengthen emotional safety in our families.
    When we raise children who can name their feelings without shame, we heal generations before them.
  4. Learn to recognize trauma responses.
    Irritability, shutdown, overworking, perfectionism, people-pleasing—these are often symptoms, not personality traits.
  5. Build community spaces where vulnerability is welcome.
    Our churches, barbershops, beauty salons, sororities, fraternities, and neighborhood circles can become healing hubs.

Moving From Resilience to Restoration

For centuries, the world has celebrated our strength—but strength without support eventually becomes suffering. In 2026 and beyond, we deserve more than resilience. We deserve restoration. We deserve joy, softness, safety, and peace. We deserve lives where our mental health is not pushed to the bottom of our priorities, but honored as the foundation for everything else.

If this year has left you tired, know that you are not alone. If it has left you hopeful, hold onto that hope fiercely. And if you are ready to heal, there is no better time than now.

A Closing Word

As a therapist and as a member of this community, I am deeply proud of every step we take toward mental wellness—whether that step is calling a therapist, setting a boundary, choosing kindness for ourselves, or simply taking a deep breath after a long day.

May we enter the next year with clarity, courage, and compassion. May we continue to break generational cycles that did not serve us. May we remember we are worthy of healing, not someday—but today.

Resources

 

Bernadette Joy Graham is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Therapist.  Please reach out at graham.bernadette@gmail.com for comment, resources or appointment information.