Penn State launches black mental health series with Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin

Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts is launching a “Global Black Communities and Mental Health” series. Organizers want to highlight racial disparities in health care and encounters with law enforcement.

This month marks five years since the death of Osaze Osagie. State College police shot and killed Osagie during a mental health check, when police say he charged at them with a knife.

Clarence Lang is the dean of the College of the Liberal Arts and a professor of African American Studies. He said the series aims to think of ways to prevent incidents like that from happening again.

“Because we know that in a racially stratified society, we have to be on guard for how issues of mental wellness in black communities can be criminalized,” Lang said.

Sinfree Makoni is the interim director of the Africana Research Center and director of African Studies. He said a series promoting black mental health care is long overdue.

“What we’re beginning to do is to establish a context in which you can have dialogue across different communities, whether it’s the police, the healthcare providers, the families affected by this, students, the professors,” Makoni said.

Sinfree hopes that dialogue can eventually turn into positive change in the community and better support networks. The series also looks to address how families and communities confront tragedies like Osagie’s – and how to move forward.

That’s why they invited guest speaker Sybrina Fulton to give the inaugural “Osaze Osagie Memorial Lecture” Tuesday night. She’s the mother of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in 2012.

“Once this tragedy happened with my son, I found myself in deep depression and sadness,” Fulton said. “I didn’t want to eat, could not sleep. Just in a state of not even living. I wasn’t. I was alive. But I wasn’t living. I had to learn how to live again.”

Fulton said she felt a disconnect from how the news media and other people viewed her and how she personally felt.

“You guys in the news and my family and everywhere I went, they were telling me how strong I was. But why was it that I didn’t feel the strength within me? And that’s because my body, my mind was out of alignment of what you all saw,” Fulton said.

Fulton said she would look in the mirror every day and tell herself that she was strong, even though she didn’t feel strong. She started to meditate and pray.

“Once I got myself to that point where I was able to at least take a shower and do all those essentials, I would go and visit the moms who had lost a child through senseless gun violence,” Fulton said.

Fulton created the “Circle of Mothers” program to bring together mothers who have lost children to gun violence. She says meeting with the families of Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland and other grieving mothers helps her heal.

Fulton also said she got counseling and encourages more people to seek help when they need it. She said many black households don’t talk about mental health.

Organizers at the College of the Liberal Arts said they plan to regroup after Tuesday’s lecture to decide what event to put on next. They hope to host the “Osaze Osagie Memorial Lecture” every year.

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