Mental-health institutions were not designed to address the kinds of ailments that arise from being marginalized or oppressed for generations. Psychotherapy has rarely been considered “a useful place of healing for African Americans,” wrote the scholar bell hooks. For a Black patient to reveal her fears and fantasies to a therapist, trained in a field that has been dominated by middle-class white people, requires a level of trust that hasn’t typically been earned. “Many black folks worry that speaking of our traumas using the language of mental illness,” hooks writes, “will lead to biased interpretation and to the pathologizing of black experience in ways that might support and sustain our continued subordination.”