Strong Black Woman Schema: Reconceptualizing Mental Health in African American Women Público
Mitchell, Valerie (Spring 2024)
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic, social and political dissension, and racial discord have contributed to America’s greatest mental health crisis. This mental health challenge is even more significant in African American women, where the Strong Black Woman schema (SBWS) and stigma of mental health in the African American communities create even more barriers for prevention and treatment of mental health conditions. The current literature defines the impact of the Strong Black Woman schema on mental health in African American women, and it acknowledges the evidence-based practice of religious cognitive behavioral therapy in general populations. A gap exists for interventions combining these concepts to address mental health in African American women. The purpose of this research was to develop, implement, and evaluate a mental health intervention that combined mental health and religion to address the mental health of African American women. The project also examined the relationship between the SBWS and mental health seeking behaviors in African American women, guided by the research question: “Does an educational intervention addressing Strong Black Woman schema combining religion and mental health improve mental health seeking attitudes and behaviors in African American women?” The researcher expected to find an inverse relationship between SBWS and mental health seeking behaviors in African American women, and expected a reversal or modification of that relationship with the implementation of the mental health intervention. The researcher invited 117 African American women to participate in a 2 hour educational mental health intervention/session with pre and post-surveys to be completed by the participants. The t test of Dependent Means was used to assess the statistical significance of the mental health intervention based on the mean score differences of the pre and post-survey results. The mean score difference of the results were statistically significant, revealing the mental health intervention helped to effectively reverse and/or mediate the inverse relationship between the SBWS and mental health seeking behaviors in African American women. The implications of this study are clinically significant for the mental health and religious sectors as they address the mental health challenges of African American women during this unprecedented mental health crisis.
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