Overview:
Rev. Sheila Poynter Johnson once helped integrate a Florida college. Nearly 60 years later, she’s challenging another inequity: bringing mental health treatments often concentrated in wealthier communities directly to Harlem.
Long before Rev. Sheila Poynter Johnson became a psychotherapist and the founder of a recently launched mental health center in Harlem, she was a teenager making what she now calls one of the toughest decisions of her life.
“I escaped in 1968, OK? And I went further south. I went to Florida and integrated a school like an idiot,” Johnson says humorously.
She grew up in Washington, D.C., when Jim Crow laws still shaped daily life.
“This is the ‘60s. It was bad everywhere — no place you could go,” Johnson says. “I didn’t see my first Black bus driver in D.C. until I was 14 years old. I can count the number of Black teachers I had growing up. All the teachers were white.”
Attending college in the Deep South certainly didn’t improve the situation.
“I integrated Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, in 1968. I was the second wave.”
Four Black students enrolled in the liberal arts college in 1964—the first in 115 years.
“Now this school is like one of the top schools — but I had my own room for four years,” she says. “I never had a roommate.”
History of Resilience and Honoring Those Who Came Before
That experience of persevering and charting a path to an enriching life runs through the mission of Harlem Family Services, the outpatient mental health center in New York City that Johnson opened in March. The center is bringing to low-income communities and Black patients innovative treatments and approaches typically found in higher-income areas among well-to-do patients.
“We wanted to use the history of resilience, creativity, and definitely political consciousness, right? And mutual care,” Johnson says. “We recognize that high-quality mental health care has too often been denied to our residents.”
Residents in the area experience clinical depression at roughly three times the citywide rate, she said. The community also has not shaken the lingering effects of the pandemic.
“We still haven’t recovered from COVID,” she said. “Our mission is grounded in health equity. We have to ensure that children, boys, and adults, especially those who are uninsured or historically marginalized, can receive timely medical care.”
Same-day Care and New Treatments to Close Gaps in Care
Central to that mission is same-day access, a rarity in a system where families routinely wait months for help.
“I spoke to a parent the other day about this. She said that it took three months to get an intake, and six months to even get an actual appointment,” Johnson says. “We know no one would accept that in the case of a broken leg. Why is it acceptable, and why are long delays still common in mental health care?”
That urgency is why Johnson named the center after Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, a pioneering figure in Harlem’s medical history. She was the first African American certified in psychoanalysis at Columbia University in 1948.
“She was a visionary physician, psychoanalyst and justice-oriented thinker,” Johnson said. She specialized in child and adolescent psychiatry.
Lawrence was mentored by famed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, who wrote the landmark book on childcare in the 1960s. Lawrence led pediatric services at Harlem Hospital for more than two decades and became the first Black American to complete a residency in child psychiatry and psychoanalysis in New York. She helped found the Harlem Family Institute—the parent organization of Harlem Family Services—and died in 2019 at 105.
“Her legacy lives on in every effort that insists on seeing strengths where others see deficits, and that’s what our legacy will be,” Johnson said.
To honor that legacy, Johnson is bringing treatments to Harlem that have never been available there. That includes participating in a clinical trial program that offers esketamine, a nasal-spray treatment that can be used to treat intractable depression symptoms.
“What I really love about our approach is that we’re introducing some interventions that have not been available in Harlem at all,” Johnson says. Roughly a third of the 21 million Americans with major depressive disorder don’t respond adequately to standard oral antidepressants, which is the population this expansion targets.
Though the name sounds similar, Johnson distinguished esketamine from ketamine, a common street drug that’s sometimes cut with fentanyl or heroin; it was a factor in the death of actor Matthew Perry in 2023.
“It’s a completely different drug,” Johnson said. “The reason why this is safe is, one, patients never get their hands on it. Two, it’s administered in the office [and the patient is] constantly monitored for two hours. And there’s no potential for addiction.”
Access to esketamine has been essentially nonexistent in Harlem, as in several other low-income New York neighborhoods. Johnson said getting it requires long subway or bus trips. To close that gap, the center plans to offer transportation vouchers.
“It’s not magical, but my God, it’s close,” Johnson says.
Harlem Family Services is also working with the Brain Fitness Foundation to offer neurofeedback treatments. It has also connected with faith leaders after becoming aware of research showing Black churchgoers can face elevated rates of depression and anxiety.
“This is where we need to do some work,” she said.
The center also has partnered with the noted Children’s Art Carnival, which has filled the clinic’s treatment rooms with art about mothers and children. Johnson is preparing to launch reflective network therapy just for kids, placing therapists inside school classrooms.
The approach depends heavily on parents, yet “a lot of times, it’s the parents who really need the treatment, and not the child,” Johnson says. “You see that when you do an intake. You realize there’s nothing wrong with this kid.”
Johnson described one case in which a father, who had never taken part in his son’s treatment before, dropped off the teenager at a subway station. The youngster had never ridden public transit by himself and became so disoriented that he refused a cold drink from Johnson, a therapist he had worked with for two years.
“He had decompensated to the point where he said, ‘My mother told me not to accept anything from strangers,’ ” Johnson recalls.
She eventually referred the teen to psychiatric care and recused herself from the case after learning his mother was reading him the medication’s frightening side-effect list. “That’s an example of sabotage,” Johnson says.
Johnson said such patterns often trace back farther than one household. “A lot of it is inter-generational transmission. The beating of children. Communication styles are passed down,” she said. “We also carry the actual trauma in our bodies that our grandmothers had. It’s like a triple whammy for Black people.”
Four months after its doors opened, Johnson says, demand for the center’s services has been high. “We’re receiving so many calls for children, and a lot of calls from my church people,” she said.
Part of the strain is a shortage of clinicians of color who specialize in children. “Only 3% of therapists are actually people of color,” Johnson said. “So I’m struggling. I’m scrambling right now. I’m looking for staff.”
Still, Johnson says the center’s purpose is rooted in the same conviction that led her into an all-white dormitory in 1968: That Harlem families deserve care built specifically for them.
“That’s our specialty,” she says. “Parents and children — that’s our bread and butter.”
