So often, a barbershop is more than just a place to get a haircut. The classic fixtures and familiar rituals serve as the backdrop for community. Today, we’re telling four stories from D.C.’s barbershops—from places that have been here for decades to new spaces that are expanding the bounds of what a barbershop can be.
When former barbershop owner Benjamin Sellers was going through a painful divorce seven years ago, he had a breakdown.
For three weeks, the master barber stopped going to church, where he played piano. He barely ate. He confined himself to his room. He wouldn’t open his shop. He couldn’t sleep.
“I was going through something and didn’t realize I was going through something until it was brought to my attention by my pastor,” Sellers says.
At the nudging of his pastor, Sellers, 58, sought professional help at the Washington, D.C. Veterans Administration Medical Center before he was transferred to a similar facility in West Virginia —he served in the U.S. Marines as a military police officer and injured his knee while on duty. Doctors diagnosed him with depression, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now, through an education program helmed by two medical professionals, Sellers is sharing his story with black men in local barbershops who may otherwise shy away from seeking professional help.
Earlier this month, he spoke to people at Wanda’s on 7th about the merits of acknowledging mental health issues and talking to a professional about them.
“People do go through ups and downs and I was telling them my testimony to encourage them, ‘Hey you don’t have to hide because if you hide, you make this worse,’” Sellers says.
Sellers is part of MHI STREET, which stands for Mental Health Improvement through Study, Teaching, Rebranding, Embedded Education, and Technology. For now, the pilot program meets people within the friendly confines of barbershops, since the stigmas behind mental health and seeing a therapist means not everyone will seek help. The program’s co-founders plan on expanding it over the next 12 months to train stations, liquor stores, movie theaters, and basketball courts.
“It’s a way of just trying to get access to people in the most efficient and low-cost way possible,” says Dr. Nnemdi Kamanu Elias, an internal medicine doctor and one of the program’s two co-founders. “People wouldn’t think twice if they broke their arm… but people will not say ‘I went for therapy’ and it’s that sort of thing we would love to change.”
Elias and Erin Athey, a nurse practitioner, created the program in 2016 after earning a fellowship from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program. The idea is to give black men in barbershops a gentle push to cope with potential mental health issues by seeking professional help. The fellowship expired this year and the women are continuing the work they’ve done through their new nonprofit, Social Health Rx, which they launched earlier in June.
Elias and Athey devised the program after noticing some of their patients had a difficult time adhering to their care plans and realizing that many possessed unaddressed and undertreated mental health issues.
The program trains both men from the community and barbers to act as allies.
Between eight and 10 D.C. community members have received training. They visit barbershops to tell stories about their struggles with mental health and how they coped with it by talking to a professional.
With barbershop owners’ permission, the squad has visited about a dozen barbershops in Ward 8, along with Carl’s Barbershop on 14th and P Streets in Logan Circle and Wanda’s on 7th in Shaw.
The hope is to hold these conversations on a quarterly basis at first, and then monthly (“You don’t want to overwhelm the shops,” Elias says.)
Meanwhile, five barbers have received training to recognize the signs of mental health in their clients and the terminology they use to describe it.
For example, if a client sat down and indicated he was ready to snap or “kurk out,” barbers would ask what was going on, listen to the answer, and remind clients that they can talk to someone about that, like a therapist, says Alfred Graham, a 34-year-old barber who went through the training. He cuts hair at Upper Cuts in downtown D.C., the Deanwood Rehab & Wellness Center nursing home, and at apartments in several Southeast neighborhoods.
Elias and Athey briefly paused the barber portion of the program because it was difficult finding enough barbers to go through the training beyond the first cohort. So they shifted the focus to training men in the community they recruited by partnering with the Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Commission on Fathers, Men and Boys.
Now they’re bringing the barber part of it back because of the powerful connections and trust barbers have with their clients. This time, the program will train barbers right in the barbershops before their shifts begin.
“Barbers themselves are fixtures, sometimes they move around from shop to shop, but they tend to be at a shop for a while,” Elias says.
Graham was a big believer in the program from the beginning because he says learning how to barber helped him avoid the same pitfalls of friends and family members who served long stretches in prison.
He likes to say barbering saved his life, so when Elias asked him to go through the training, he didn’t hesitate.
“She said ‘black men’ and ‘mental health’ and once she said ‘black men,’ she had me,” says Graham. “We’re leading the charge in negative rates and the resources are extremely limited as it relates to initiatives for black men, so when she said that, I’m in, because something has to be done.”
Right now, the medical professionals don’t track how many people have actually sought help following the visits. They’re still working out the kinks and making sure there’s enough support to keep it going. And the program went on hiatus for several months while the doctors reevaluated it and worked to secure more funding. So it’s hard to say how effective their outreach has been beyond anecdotes.
“This is not a magic wand, but let’s just change the conversations around the concept of mental health and well-being,” Elias says.
Barbershops are sacred spaces in the black community. Men go there not just for a haircut and shave, but to catch up on gossip, talk about what’s going on in the world, express their joys and struggles, and let their hair down in a safe space.
One of the challenges the black community faces is sharing personal information with people who don’t understand the dynamics at play, and that’s where the program can help, says Dr. Kevin Washington, a psychologist who helped develop the curriculum for the program and helps lead the training.
Slavery promoted the racist ideology that blacks were inferior to white people to justify the institution, an ideology Washington says never went away. Even though chattel slavery ended more than 100 years ago in the United States, its legacy remains through systemic racism. It oftentimes dictates how black people will be treated in the criminal justice system, what the quality of healthcare they receive will be, and much more.
For a professional to break through that systemic trauma, he or she has to be aware of it in order to shift the paradigm, Washington says.
“When you have an oppressed or marginalized group, there are a number of barriers to overcome,” Washington says.
Many black men suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from serving time in prison, seeing people die, witnessing or experiencing violence, enduring racism, and more, Elias says.
On the positive side, therapy and prayers have helped Sellers put his life back together.
Today, he has a girlfriend and has plans to work for the Washington D.C. VA Medical Center shuttling patients to their appointments and playing piano for the choir and chaplain there.
And he still sees his doctor on Tuesday afternoons to make sure he doesn’t slip into another depression.
“It made me realize that life goes on,” Sellers says of his experience. “Things happen, but you’ve got to be able to overcome it. Life doesn’t stop because issues come about.”
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