When she was growing up, Rachel Bailey was taught that only rich, self-indulgent White people suffered from mental health issues. Black people were supposed to be tougher. Although she remembers struggling with what was later diagnosed as bipolar disorder since she was 4 years old, it wasn’t until age 34 that she began to seek treatment, checking herself into a psychiatric ward after a severe mental breakdown.
“People of other races, especially White people, they get to be crazy and have their reasons and their subtle shades of insanity,” Bailey says. “It’s unfair that you get to be insane in colorful ways and I just get to be nuts and go to jail and rot there.”
Bailey was one of 11 Black performers who shared their stories in front of an audience of 600 people at TMI Project’s inaugural Black Stories Mattershow in 2017.
[For more on this story by Isabelle Morrison, go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/peo...communities-20180416]
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