Jackson Free Press

Laqwanda Roberts doesn't look like the type of person to suffer from mental-health issues. Bloggers and video bloggers often praise Roberts for her fashion sense and beautiful natural hair. She even has her own YouTube channel, titled "Regal Fro," which focuses on her natural-hair journey and gives tips for African American women trying to stay away from chemical processing.

Her warm and friendly personality is a testament to how she's managed her journey with mental illness, she said at a recent Friday Forum at Koinonia Coffee House. Roberts, now 35, began dealing with major depression starting in her teens, which led to her suicide attempt at age 15. She went on to earn a master's degree in social work from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and became a psychotherapist.

Flash-forward to a night in January 2010, when Roberts admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital emergency room, saying she "didn't feel safe." The day before, Roberts had slipped into a state of psychosis. "At the height of the experience, I somehow slipped into (believing) that one of my sisters was going to betray me, so she became Judas, and I became Jesus," she said.

She had it in her mind to end her sister's life, but said that just before she could get to the room her sister was sleeping in, she stopped. Her little brother came out of his room and said, "'Laqwanda, go to sleep."

The next day, while taking her sister to school, Roberts snapped again, and this time chased her sister into the campus police station at a community college. She began struggling with an officer, who then handcuffed her. She only received "disorderly conduct," but that night, she drove to the psychiatric hospital emergency room and admitted herself.

In February 2012, Roberts experienced a suicide in the family. At the recent Friday Forum, she said that in the midst of learning about how the suicide happened, she realized she had never spoken out about her own journey—how she, too, had tried to take her own life, and that she had been in a psychiatric hospital. She said that because she was feeling overwhelmed, she woke up one night at 3 a.m., turned on her web camera and started telling her story. "(I) just started talking, and just started talking, and started talking," she said. "And what I had was my story told exactly the way I wanted to tell it—that it wasn't easy, it was hard, and that I felt devastated."

A study published in 2005 reported that 57.5 million American adults experience mental illness, with the most common being depression. Though the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2007 that African Americans make up 12 percent of the country's total population, they make up almost 19 percent of people affected by mental illness. They have higher rates of inpatient care (which includes staying in a hospital), but lower rates of using outpatient services, such as counseling.

African Americans are also more likely to encounter more barriers in seeking help. In 1996, Mental Health America did a survey on clinical depression to see what people knew about depression, how they felt about it and what prevents treatment. Sixty-three percent of African Americans who took the survey said that depression is a personal weakness, and 40 to 50 percent said that it's a normal part of life. The National Association for Mental Illness said that, as opposed to doctors or psychotherapists, African Americans mostly rely on family, community and religion for emotional and mental support. In a study published in 2007, depression was more prevalent in African American women than African American men, though men haven't gained as much economically.

"... Because of what we look like, for African Americans, people think that we don't have those types of thoughts," Roberts said. "People think that we don't commit suicide, but there's a tombstone in Forest, Mississippi, that tells otherwise. There's hospital records, on my part, that show we do."

*This story has been edited to reflect a change to an error. The previous version of this story said that Roberts' family member committed suicide a few months before the Friday Forum. The death actually occurred in February 2012.