What research on radical healing and mental health access reveals about what our communities actually need
It’s National Wellness Month, which means your feed is probably full of the unofficial approved wellness treatments: cold plunges, green juice, eight-step skincare routines. None of that is wrong, but it’s also not the whole picture. Especially for Black and brown communities, where wellness has never been about a routine. It’s been about survival, connection, and care passed down through generations.
Turns out, the research agrees with us.
Radical Healing
In 2020, a team of psychologists, Bryana French, Jioni Lewis, Della Mosley, Hector Adames, Nayeli Chavez-Dueñas, Grace Chen, and Helen Neville, introduced something the field hadn’t fully named before: a psychological framework built specifically for how People of Color and Indigenous individuals heal from racial trauma. They called it Radical Healing (French et al., 2020).
The idea came from a simple but overlooked problem. Most mental health approaches were built around individual coping, one person, one therapist, one set of tools. But racial trauma isn’t just individual. It’s collective, historical, and ongoing. So the researchers built a framework that reflects that reality, drawing from liberation psychology, Black psychology, and the lived wisdom of communities who’ve been healing each other long before clinical language caught up.
The framework rests on five anchors (French et al., 2020):
Critical consciousness: Seeing racism and oppression clearly, instead of internalizing it as personal failure.
Radical hope : The belief that communities of color have the collective capacity to heal and build better futures, even against the odds.
Cultural authenticity and self-knowledge: Being defined by your own history and identity, not by the narratives placed on you.
Collectivism: Leaning on family, faith, friendship, and community as legitimate, powerful sources of healing, not as a substitute for “real” treatment.
Strength and resistance: Recognizing joy, resilience, and everyday survival as forms of power, not just outcomes to hope for.
Read those five anchors again and you’ll notice something: most of them aren’t things a single person does alone in a therapy room. They’re things communities do together. That’s the whole point. Radical healing isn’t anti-therapy, it’s a reminder that culture, community, and collective memory are not “extra.” They’re clinical.
The Gap: What the Data Actually Shows
Here’s why this framework matters right now, not just in theory.
A national study published in the journal Psychiatric Services analyzed outpatient mental health care use across the U.S. and found that white adults used outpatient mental health services at more than double the rate of Black or Hispanic adults (Olfson et al., 2023). The gap isn’t about who needs care. It’s about who can access it.
And access isn’t just about appointments, it’s about whether the care that is available actually fits. A study of Black caregivers published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities found that the large majority considered it important to have a mental health provider who shared their race and ethnicity, citing greater comfort, easier rapport, and a stronger sense of representation as the reasons why (Moore et al., 2023). For a lot of people, the barrier isn’t finding a therapist. It’s finding one who gets it.
Put those two findings together and they highlight the fact that fewer Black and Hispanic adults are getting care in the first place. Among those who do, many are navigating a system where representation and cultural understanding still can’t be taken for granted.
Why This Isn’t a Contradiction, It’s the Point
The science backs up what our communities have always practiced. Healing that leans on culture, collective strength, and shared identity isn’t a workaround for “real” mental health care. Research increasingly treats it as part of real mental health care, especially when the traditional system still has real, measurable gaps in who it reaches.
That’s the tension we sit in every day at BLHF. We know therapy matters. We also know therapy alone isn’t the only answer for communities still fighting to be seen, understood, and reached by the system meant to help them.
Wellness, done right, is both culturally competent care and the auntie who checks in with you every Sunday. A licensed therapist and the Sunday dinners your family has done for three generations. It’s radical hope and setting an actual appointment on the calendar.
Where BLHF Comes In
This is exactly why we built the Let’s Talk! Resource Guide, a free directory built specifically to close the gap the data points to: providers who understand the communities they’re serving, without the guesswork or the fear of not being understood.
Wellness isn’t a trend to opt into. It’s tradition to return to, backed now by the research to prove it works.
Looking for a provider who actually understands your background? The Let’s Talk! Resource Guide is free, built for our community, and ready when you are.
Sources
French, B. H., Lewis, J. A., Mosley, D. V., Adames, H. Y., Chavez-Dueñas, N. Y., Chen, G. A., & Neville, H. A. (2020). Toward a Psychological Framework of Radical Healing in Communities of Color. The Counseling Psychologist, 48(1), 14–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000019843506 Cited in: “The Research: Radical Healing” section, framework and five anchors.
Olfson, M., Zuvekas, S. H., McClellan, C., Wall, M. M., Hankerson, S. H., & Blanco, C. (2023). Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Outpatient Mental Health Care in the United States. Psychiatric Services, 74(7), 674–683. PMID: 36597696. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.20220365 Cited in: “The Gap: What the Data Actually Shows” section, outpatient service use rates by race/ethnicity.
Moore, C., Coates, E., Watson, A., de Heer, R., McLeod, A., & Prudhomme, A. (2023). “It’s Important to Work with People that Look Like Me”: Black Patients’ Preferences for Patient-Provider Race Concordance. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 10(5), 2552–2564. PMID: 36344747. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-022-01435-y Cited in: “The Gap: What the Data Actually Shows” section, provider representation and rapport findings.
