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Mental Illness in the American Black Community

NPR's Farai Chideya discusses the taboo of mental illness in black communities with Dr. Alvin Poussaint and Amy Alexander, co-authors of Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans. Dr. Poussaint is a professor at Harvard Medical School.

Copyright 2005 NPR

Farai Chideya
Farai Chideya is a multimedia journalist who has worked in print, television, online, and radio. Prior to joining NPR's News & Notes, Chideya hosted Your Call, a daily news and cultural call-in show on San Francisco's KALW 91.7 FM. Chideya has also been a correspondent for ABC News, anchored the prime time program Pure Oxygen on the Oxygen women's channel, and contributed commentaries to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and BET. She got her start as a researcher and reporter at Newsweek magazine. In 1997 Newsweek named her to its "Century Club" of 100 people to watch.