Young Hollywood star, actor Kofi Siriboe, directs his first short film, “WTF is Mental Health?” to bring light to a topic that normally is presented with stigma. He makes a distinction between mental health and mental illness.
Siriboe is using his platform to reach out specifically to black youth, encouraging vulnerability and open conversation.
“I feel like with mental health, people always react negatively. We kinda have a lot of stigma in our community and in society in general…I feel like that space wasn’t really created for us.”
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“Making ‘WTF Is Mental Health?’ has been a part of a healing process for me, one I’m still exploring,” Siriboe added. “It’s the companion piece to ‘Jump,’ a short film I made after a mentor and big brother figure died by suicide, just before I got the call that I’d been cast in ‘Queen Sugar.’ I started working on this beautiful, emotional show and felt how liberating it was to channel my fears into art. As I began to mold ‘Jump,’ I realized the true conversation I was craving centered on young black people who are figuring out this mental health thing, too.”
“I get to express, but what about those people who don’t have that opportunity, they’re bottling up all this emotion and being told it’s not real then we wanna talk about mental health after there’s a reaction to what’s been bottled up … and it’s not gonna stop. It’s only gonna keep getting worse,” he said of the suicide rates. “It creates a system that disconnects a person, disconnects a community and we’re weak that way. It creates a vulnerability that isn’t strength. It’s not chosen. We should be vulnerable by choice cause that’s all we can be. We have to acknowledge what it is and accept it.”
See more on Huffington Post exclusive article.
Huffington Post: Kofi Siriboe Makes An Urgent Case For Discussing Black Mental Health
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