Every month, Joey Womack gathers online with a group of Black men from the South for honest conversations—often on mental health. In a world where silence can be deadly, these discussions offer a space for these men to be seen and heard.
“Black men are not necessarily transparent about what's going on,” Womack said. “They tend to believe they’re the only ones going through an issue. And keeping those stressors [to themselves] typically only ends up in something bad happening."
According to a 2022 federal report, suicide was the third leading cause of death for Black males between the ages of 10 and 24.
Womack recently invited Jon Brown of the Tallahassee-based Black Men’s Mental Health Initiative to one of his roundtable discussions. Brown’s program works to connect Black men to mental health care, including digitally based services.
“Having that discussion was extremely powerful. It led to members opening up and talking about their health in ways they never would have shared before,” Womack said of Brown’s presentation. “People were sharing resources, best practices, and really supporting each other.”
Brown’s program recently received $24,000 from the United Way of the Big Bend. The funding will support operations in five of the region's counties, including Madison County (35% Black), Jefferson County (31% Black), and majority-minority Gadsden County.
“There will always be an overwhelming need,” says Brown of mental health services for Black men. “Unfortunately…, [Black men] are often the first and the worst affected. But that also means there’s an opportunity to lead this work right here in the Big Bend area.”
In 2014, the Mental Health Council of the Big Bend conducted a local survey that revealed a major gap in mental health services across predominantly Black neighborhoods. That’s a concern since people living in these neighborhoods often face additional mental health stressors, such as higher rates of poverty and gun violence.
Data from the Leon County Council on the Status of Men and Boys shows most gun violence victims and offenders in the county are Black males between the ages of 15 and 24–the same demographic that also ranks high among suicides.
Brown is partnering with Tallahassee’s National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Nancy O’Farrell is the group’s executive director. She has worked alongside Brown in the mental health space for more than a decade.
“Typically, men are reluctant to take good care of themselves. One of our missions…is to have Black male therapists available to say, ‘Hey guys, it’s okay to talk about this.’ [The Black Men’s Mental Health Initiative] really helps NAMI because we’d love to get more men into our support groups,” O’Farrell said.
Brown says he got the idea to focus on Black men’s health as he reflected on the media landscape in the late '90s and early 2000s. He says when he looked at popular health magazines, the person on the cover was almost always either a white man or a wealthy Black man—men like Kevin Hart, Jamie Foxx and Barack Obama. While those figures are inspirational, Brown said they don’t reflect the lived reality of most Black men.
“Barack Obama—wonderful timing, amazing individual, great background experience. But how many more Barack Obamas will there be?” Brown said. “If we can only see ourselves in the two to three percentile when it comes to health, that’s problematic.”
Brown hopes his initiative will help increase representation so more Black men will be able to see people like them accessing mental health care and prioritizing their overall health. This could look like connecting someone to a mental health professional who accepts their insurance, or helping them find culturally aligned therapists who may be better able to assist their needs.
“We want to make sure men know how to navigate this and who they can reach out to— and that it’s okay,” Brown said.
“Sometimes, just getting to tomorrow means knowing you’re not alone—that you’re not on an island, and there’s a brother you can turn to.”
