This post was originally published on Sacramento Observer

By Genoa Barrow

Editor’s Note: This is the first of eight stories sharing local Black men’s personal mental health trials and triumphs. The men were among those who responded to Senior Staff Writer Genoa Barrow’s community engagement questionnaire, titled “Where’s Your Head At?” and indicated their willingness to share their wider experiences. The OBSERVER thanks them for being vulnerable, rising above the stigma of speaking about mental health issues and will share their deeply moving stories over the coming weeks.

For years, Ryan McClinton has worked in the space where mental health and community well-being intersect. It wasn’t until 2023, however, that the South Sacramento native began looking at his own experiences differently.

McClinton, 38, lists unaddressed familial trauma, community trauma, systemic racism, classism, the lack of culturally competent mental health services, workplace trauma, imposter syndrome, depression and self-doubt among the challenges he’s working to overcome. He sees a therapist for anxiety.

“I’ve been dealing with anxiety for much longer than I realized,” McClinton tells The OBSERVER. “I didn’t know all the ways anxiety shows up. I knew what the definition of anxiety was, but I think that’s the thing about mental health, especially as a Black man, there’s these associations of the words that are used to describe mental health and behavioral health that don’t always show up the same ways that we experience life.”

He recalls his father at one time pointing out how he had the habit of his leg shaking. He’d also ball up his fists a lot. McClinton originally associated both actions with being mad or “fired up” and being unable to do anything about it. Today, he credits those early displays of emotion to his environment.

“I grew up in South Sacramento. Gun violence and police presence was a norm, hearing police helicopters were a norm. These were things I expected to see every other day. Family members getting shot. Being shot at myself. All these traumas that we had were commonplace. We don’t realize that our bodies are tracking all of this or receiving all this energy constantly. We’re finding ways to mentally power through, but it’s not going to move forward. The body is still receiving all of that stuff, having anxiety. What I learned beginning last year was that I’ve been storing this the entire time. I started really focusing on my healing and really listening to my body. If you look at a scale from one to 10, my baseline for anxiety is a four.”

Super Focused

“One diagnosis we hear a lot when we’re younger kids, especially if you can’t focus, is ADHD. Well, I can focus, so it wasn’t ADHD, but my brain was constantly going because I’m constantly doing the things that I was raised to do when I was younger,” McClinton says.

He was trained to have the hypervigilance that comes with being a young Black boy in America.

“Be aware of your surroundings; make sure you’re watching to make sure you’re aware of the energy of people who come in. These things that you learned to survive with became so commonplace that my brain just got locked into a space of always going at a fast pace,” he rattles off.

He learned, through a process called gamma healing, that these all were symptoms of anxiety.

“You can’t turn your brain down, so you’re getting exhausted mentally because anxiety is constantly threatening you,” McClinton says. “I think about several steps down the line, what I was trained to think of, as ‘No, you’re just thinking ahead and you’re trying to make sure that you’re thinking of all the possibilities.’ That’s trauma response because I’m worried about the risk of things that happen and I’m not paying attention. All these things cultivate more and more anxiety.”

McClinton learned the language for his experiences through therapy and a great deal of self-reflection. Participating in a support group, Black Men Maroon Space, has also been a game changer for McClinton. The Oakland-based group’s founder, Brandon Stewart, reached out to him after seeing several posts he made on social media engaging Black men on the topic of mental health. The two had previously worked together in community organizing through the faith-based network PICO California. 

“It’s body-based healing,” McClinton says. “How do we get more in tune with our bodies instead of what most psychology and therapists teach us, which is how to deal with the neck up. The somatics piece will tap into the fullness of your body. It’s learning how to listen to your body and what it’s telling you.”

It’s all connected, he says.

“That helps the reflection, that helps the therapy tools, because it started making me very aware of the different signals my body gives me if something’s off. I started recognizing that feeling of anxiety more and more because I started slowing down and really trying to just get in tune with what my body’s responses were.”

McClinton speaks reverently about an ongoing retreat hosted by Black Men Maroon Space in the Santa Cruz area.

“It’s up in the mountains, somewhere where we’re isolated and we get to cut off the distractions, we have a safe container to really unpack our experiences, our emotions and share what we really feel,” McClinton says. “As we’re doing that, we’re learning these somatic practices that help us ground ourselves to regulate our bodies, be aware of our reactions and start making choices, or different choices, so we have some agency over our lives.”

Having a “fresh set of eyes” helps the men navigate their lives better, McClinton says.

“Once we have that heightened awareness and get some of the skills and tools to practice, it’s, ‘OK, here’s how I actually say no and put up these healthy boundaries.’ Here’s how I have agency over how I choose to respond versus feeling like ‘Man, I’m always angry.’… We now have a choice to say, ‘OK, I’m not going to be angry with this, I’m actually just going to step back and do whatever I need to do to give myself peace.’” 

At the end of the yearlong sessions, the men take a self-affirming trip to Ghana. McClinton took his second journey with the group in December.

“Now that we have these practices, we go through this pilgrimage, if you will, of returning to Ghana and going through The Door of No Return,” he says. “We release those chains of trauma that we’ve been introduced to here in the States. We started learning what were the practices of our ancestors and what our brothers and sisters of the current day do to take care of themselves. It was crazy, spiritual, super grounding, and just something that I’ve recommended and I’ve told every single Black person I’ve talked to, ‘You need to go.’”

McClinton calls being surrounded by unapologetic Blackness a “beautiful experience.”

“I couldn’t put my finger on it because I hadn’t experienced it before. Then I thought, ‘Oh, this is what it feels like to not be dominated by whiteness everywhere I turn. Everywhere I look there’s this piece of my identity that I have to defend, protect, be mindful of.’ [In Ghana], I don’t have to be a ‘Black man,’ I just get to be a man. That was a powerful thing. There’s so much stress that doesn’t move in my body because I’m not worried about a cop driving by or pulling up.”

Coming back home, McClinton was able to have a different conversation with his therapist.

“Now I can process a lot more of what I’m feeling and what I’m experiencing, what my emotions are, what my disruptions are and in turn, they work together versus it being one or the other. I need all these tools,” he says.

The things that have impacted McClinton and have helped him advance, he now talks to other Black men about, to help get them on their own healing journey. He also mentors young men, encouraging them to work on themselves and their mental well-being. He interacts with them as he wishes someone had with him.

“It’s actually been a fascinating journey. I remember being the same age of the mentees I speak with now, wanting a mentor and not finding anybody that represented what I wanted to see in a Black man and where I wanted to go. That alone is very humbling.”

These brotha to brotha “check-ins” are typically precipitated by moms, sisters and aunts who think the young men in their lives can benefit from interacting with McClinton and him giving them a safe space to talk about their emotions, frustrations and stressors.

Space to Grow

There’s a culture shift happening, McClinton says.

“I can’t recall any other point in history where Black men’s mental health and wellness was as commonly spoken about as it is right now.”

He attributes the increased focus to Black people themselves.

“It’s the work of people of color doing their healing work, Black women really getting into their healing work and the ripple effects of it,” McClinton says. We can’t really do what we need to do until we heal up.”

Black men are talking amongst themselves and are feeling freer to join support groups and speak out in healing circles.

“I’m just happy that it’s happening culturally because now we can really start attacking it, where we can find the generational conversation that we need to have, where we can find the space that speaks to your voicing your experience. It’s been a long time needed and we’re finally getting to that point.”

Black wellness has become a real topic, McClinton says.

“When we started digging into what Black wellness means and how it shows up, it’s unavoidable that you get to this point where we have to start talking about how we are emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually experiencing things and what it means to get into a healthy space.”

In addition to his work as a program manager with Public Health Advocates, McClinton is a board member of Safe Black Space, whose community healing circles were born in response to increased racial tensions and trauma after the March 2018 killing of Stephon Clark, an unarmed 22-year-old, by Sacramento police officers. The sessions are meant to provide a chance for Black people to deal with the multitude of emotions evoked by other deaths of this nature and the continued poor treatment of Blacks in America. 

The aftermath of protests over Clark’s death and lack of accountability still linger for McClinton. He was among a group that included community leaders and clergy who were arrested during a march through the affluent “Fab 40s” neighborhood in East Sacramento in 2019, after officials decided not to charge the two officers who fired upon Clark. McClinton’s rotator cuff was torn during the melee. The city settled a lawsuit with McClinton and other marchers in 2020 for nearly $500,000.

McClinton admits he still hasn’t processed the trauma of being cornered by police on the 51st Street overpass over Highway 50 alongside his Public Health Advocates colleague, epidemiologist Dr. Flojaune Cofer. Dr. Cofer is now running for mayor on a platform of change.

“It’s a big portion of my job. I need to be able to talk to City Council members in those chambers and advocate for our community’s needs,” McClinton says. “And every single time I step into City Hall, I get flooded with all the traumatic moments from the day after that arrest: walking in there with that sling on my arm.; seeing Flo’s picture plastered on articles of her crying in response to the pain that we felt in that room that day where it turned chaotic. And then heaven forbid I actually go near the bridge.” 

McClinton has “mental and emotional scarring” from being cornered and recalls feeling as if he were on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 during one of the darkest days of the civil rights movement. Eerily, that brutal attack on Blacks peacefully protesting the lack of voting rights also happened in March, as did Clark’s death and the Fab 40s incident.

“We were walking on the bridge and those [officers’] bikes were lined up with the lights off. We didn’t see them until we were closer to them and I thought, ‘Oh, my god, this is about to be Bloody Sunday.’

“I was looking down the street that was pitch black and a helicopter that was flying around us went away,” McClinton continues. “As I looked back on the other end of the bridge, which was our only other place to go, there were over 200-plus officers marching down here in full [riot gear] and I was thinking we might get murdered on this bridge.”

Adult marchers, knowing the confrontation was being filmed live for social media, started having younger participants yell out their names and birthdays so they could have jail support, and people could find out where they were, in case anything happened. 

“The hard part about doing this mental health work and doing this healing work on myself, my own journey, is that there are so many traumas to unpack. That’s just one.” 

McClinton also recalls being on the frontlines of earlier Clark protests that shut down a local freeway before shutting down Golden 1 Center. He was among the older people who tried to keep participating youth from being struck and likely killed as their anger and upset propelled them into oncoming traffic. These moments reaffirm for McClinton that there is much work to be done toward community healing, but they also haunt him personally. 

“There’s countless of these traumas that my body’s felt, that still live with me, that my memory holds. We compartmentalize just to be able to survive.”

“Head Space: Exploring Black Men’s Mental Health” is an OBSERVER’s special series.This project is being reported with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2024 Ethnic Media Collaborative, Healing California. Senior Staff Writer Genoa Barrow and The OBSERVER are among the collaborative’s inaugural participants.

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