Chapter six
On a hectic day in April 2019, the Hollywood stylist Audrey Brianne took a belt out of her closet, put it around her neck, and decided to end her life. The death of her younger brother Jason in 2015 from diabetes, along with the murder of one of her closest friends by a stalker the following year, sent Brianne into an emotional downward spiral. One of the few Black stylists consistently dressing celebrities for awards shows and red-carpet events, she felt extreme pressure to perform, giving her no time to catch her breath or grieve her loved ones. Buoyed by vodka, which she bought by the handle and consumed from 7:00 a.m., when she got up, until 2:00 a.m., when her head hit the pillow, she pushed herself through seven-day workweeks, keeping up the grind, afraid to say no. She worked hard but appeared easygoing and accommodating, in an attempt to battle back stereotypes of Black women as loud, angry, and trifling. She was always available to her clients, phone number never on do not disturb, until the weight of the job, the deaths, and the depression that had been dragging her down, off and on, since high school finally pulled her under. Still, as she stood in her condo in Los Angeles, depressed and depleted, she realized she didn’t actually want to die, but she also didn’t know how to live with the bottomless pain and darkness that had seeped into every corner of her life. So instead of hanging herself, she turned to her phone and googled “suicide hotline.” When a calm voice answered the 800 call, she told him, “I’m having a really hard time right now, and I almost just did something really stupid.” He stayed on the line with her for two hours and brought her back from the brink.
Black Americans have long lived under tremendous emotional pressure in the face of bias and inequality, much of it sanctioned by the government and embedded in the structures and institutions of society since the earliest days of the country. Just as high-effort coping eats away at the physical health of Black Americans—as framed by Arline Geronimus and her theory of weathering on the body—struggling against discrimination frays and fractures their mental health. A 2018 national survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that African Americans are 20 percent more likely to have serious psychological distress than whites; they are also more likely than whites to report persistent symptoms such as sadness, hopelessness, and feeling as if everything seems like a struggle. Poverty worsens this struggle, but even people like Audrey Brianne, who have achieved success in their industries, get worn down emotionally by the macro- and microaggressions, slights, and subtle, often indirect, forms of discrimination they face when working, learning, and living in predominantly white spaces. This can result in everything from fatigue to feelings of failure and anger and can trigger depression or other forms of mental illness. For those who are already suffering from mental health issues, it can become dangerous and life threatening. The proliferation of high-profile police killings of Black people in recent years has created repeated trauma and stress; a 2018 study at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine found that police killings of unarmed African Americans have adverse effects on mental health among Black American adults who were not directly affected by the incident.
Understanding and confronting mental illness remain difficult for nearly everyone, regardless of race. A lack of sympathy for the mentally ill—and a dearth of understanding of mental illness—exacerbate this problem in the United States, where public stigma motivates people to fear, reject, and discriminate against those with mental illness. Despite public information campaigns costing tens of millions of dollars, Americans are suspicious of people with severe mental illness, believing them to always be violent. In fact, the vast majority aren’t. Instead, they are much more likely to be victimized by violence than the general population. Deinstitutionalization has driven significant numbers of mentally ill people into public spaces, where they are vulnerable. This government policy, which dates to the 1960s, led to a decline in treatment options for those suffering from serious psychiatric disorders. A 2012 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center found the number of inpatient treatment beds in state psychiatric facilities decreased further by 14 percent from 2005 to 2010, leaving only 14 available beds per 100,000 people. Instead, those who could have been living in a psychiatric facility or treated at a hospital—men and women with schizophrenia, severe bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses—are far too often living in or spending the bulk of their days in public places such as libraries, parks, and mass transit, without affordable access to comprehensive treatment. If they become disruptive, there is a good chance someone will call the police.
For Black people struggling with mental illness, the perception that they are violent is compounded by racist stereotypes, creating extreme intolerance, a lack of empathy, and fear. In fact, even as they may be viewed as violent, and punished for it, far too many Black Americans suffer mental illness in silence because of the false idea that emotional struggles signal weakness. They may also believe suffering is their lot. In Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s grandmother tells her, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” Black women, she is saying, faced with both racism and sexism, bear the weight of the world, without praise or even thanks. That kind of belief explains why emotional pain can go unnoticed by individuals even as they suffer, under the assumption that it is an inextricable part of the Black experience in America, a burden to be endured or ignored.
Audrey Brianne’s dance with her demons began at age fifteen. Her father, a telecommunications executive, started a new job and relocated his wife and four children from Denver to Palo Alto in 1999. In that city in Northern California, Blacks make up about 2 percent of the population. To fit in at her new school, Audrey joined the swim team. With her brown skin and thick body constantly on display in practice and at meets, Audrey felt depressed and out of place, and by age sixteen she had developed an eating disorder. Bulimia led to rapid weight loss, but she flew under the radar: it has long been incorrectly assumed by mental health providers as well as in the Black community that Black women don’t suffer from eating disorders. Bulimia and anorexia have historically been associated with young, white women, though in reality they affect people from all demographics of all ethnicities at similar rates. A 2009 study found that Black teens are 50 percent more likely to binge and purge yet receive treatment much less frequently. A 2020 review of thirty-eight previous studies again corrected the false assumption that Black women are immune to eating disorders and added that research on eating disorders has focused on white women, with Black people underrepresented in clinical trials.
At first, Audrey received praise for losing weight. But as she got smaller and smaller—she eventually lost more than sixty pounds, her clothing size reduced to a 0—her parents grew alarmed. And it wasn’t just the weight loss that frightened Audrey’s parents; they could see that their daughter was not herself. Audrey describes her sadness as a kind of heaviness that she had to carry. Her parents forced her into therapy, but Audrey was sullen and uncooperative during her sessions. She would sit in the therapist’s office for an hour, silent and defiant. Eventually, she switched to group therapy, focused on teens with eating issues; she was the only Black person in the group. Even at her lowest point emotionally, she maintained an A average and stayed on the honor roll. During her senior year, the family relocated back to Denver and settled in Cherry Creek, a section where Blacks make up a tiny proportion of the population. Audrey was better now; she had put some of the weight back on and had discovered a love of fashion through a club at her high school. In 2002, she enrolled in the University of Colorado at Boulder, a large public university with more than thirty-six thousand students, only about 2 percent of them Black, and pledged Gamma Phi Beta, an almost all-white sorority. Though her mental health and weight were more stable in college, she remembers finding it difficult and lonely to constantly “integrate” the classrooms she studied in, the dorms she lived in, and later the fashion internships and early jobs in Los Angeles, where she landed after college.
When I met Audrey, I empathized with her about the often silent toll it takes to constantly be an “only”; living with mental illness makes it even more challenging for her. I also grew up in Denver and went to the University of Colorado. In fact, I introduced myself to her at a CU alumni event in 2021 where she discussed her struggles with emotional health. As she shared her story that day, I thought about the long-standing perception that suicide is a white problem; Black people die from homicide, whites from suicide, the assumption goes, despite research that points to a concerning increase in suicidal behavior among Black youth since the early 1990s. I was also keenly reminded of another successful Black woman who drove herself to impossibly high standards while grappling with crippling depression: Leanita McClain, who gained fame three decades earlier as a face of tragedy.
By all measures, McClain, a journalist, had achieved success. In 1984, she was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and the first Black and second woman to join the publication’s powerful editorial board. Her twice-weekly column reached one million readers. McClain had first gained national prominence four years earlier at the age of twenty-nine when she published an essay about race called “The Middle-Class Black’s Burden” in Newsweek. In it, she described the strain of having a foot in two worlds: the housing project on the South Side of Chicago where she had been raised and the nearly all-white upper echelons of journalism where she had landed. The double bind she felt surfaced early in a poem she wrote in high school. It begins, “I should like to die in winter / When my blood upon the snow / Will leave a clue to those who pass / Of my brief, futile life,” and ends, “And none will learn the truth of the matter. / My secret will melt with the snow. / But the spot will run red each winter hence. / Though I be rotted below.” And though having a My Turn column in Newsweek is a high point in any career, McClain’s also reads like a cry for help. “I have a foot in each world, but I cannot fool myself about either,” she wrote. “I can see the transparent deceptions of some whites and the bitter hopelessness of some blacks. I know how tenuous my grip on one way of life is, and how strangling the grip of the other way of life can be.”
Hiding behind a meticulously maintained outward-facing image, McClain was struggling with serious depression. After a suicide attempt in 1981, she was hospitalized and prescribed psychiatric medication by her physician. On May 29, 1984, she swallowed a handful of antidepressants that she had stockpiled and died alone. In one of six suicide notes she left behind, she wrote, “Happiness is a private club that will not let me enter. As my dreams will never come true, I choose to have them in perpetual sleep.” Her suicide sent shock waves through journalism circles across the country. Her early poetry, journalistic work, and suicide notes were compiled in a posthumous book, A Foot in Each World, edited by her former husband, the journalist Clarence Page.
The public relations executive Terrie Williams sent similar shocks through the Black community in 2005 with a personal essay published in Essence titled “Depression and the Superwoman.” Williams too had “made it.” Trained as a social worker, she switched gears in 1988 and opened the Terrie Williams Agency, a PR firm with Miles Davis and Eddie Murphy as early clients. By the time I met her sometime in the 1990s, she was widely considered the publicist to Black Hollywood and over the years represented Prince, Janet Jackson, Al Sharpton, Johnnie Cochran, and many other luminaries. But in 2003, Williams experienced a soul-crushing bout of depression. It had been sneaking up on her, but she ignored the signs, keeping on her game face while, like Audrey Brianne, running herself ragged in service of her business and clients’ needs. Eventually, the pain built to an unbearable degree and she collapsed, unable to get out of bed for days. In 2005, Essence’s editor in chief, Susan L. Taylor, persuaded her to share her story, including the shame she felt as she coped with the taboo of mental illness among Black Americans and her path to healing. There is no way to describe the collective relief thousands of Black women felt when Williams explained how depression forced her to pull off the mask, take off the Superwoman cape, and stop hiding, lying, and pretending she was okay. She received ten thousand letters and followed up in 2008 with a very popular book, Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting. The title still strikes a chord.
Millions of African Americans struggle with mental illness, yet only 33 percent of them receive mental health treatment each year, compared with the U.S. average of 44 percent of all those who suffer. Research shows that African Americans are more likely to turn to emergency rooms or primary care physicians during a mental health crisis, or receive no help for emotional distress at all. Why don’t the majority of Black people with mental health challenges get needed care? First, stigma. Instead of seeking psychological help—or sometimes help of any kind, even from loved ones—Black women especially choose to carry the load, often turning to religion when facing mental health issues, most commonly depression. Living in communities that lack adequate transportation and health-care facilities creates additional hurdles to getting affordable treatment for mental illness or help at all. A history of distrust in the medical system includes lack of confidence in mental health providers; Black Americans often don’t trust that health-care professionals of all kinds have their best interests at heart. If they are dealing with additional personal issues, such as sexuality or gender identity, it can compound feelings of isolation and create fear of seeking help.
For those who overcome the stigma and look for help, getting good treatment for mental illness can be challenging. The vast majority of mental health treatment providers in the United States are white: about 84 percent of the psychology workforce is white and 4 percent Black, according to American Psychological Association data. Even the most well-meaning white mental health providers may lack the cultural competence to deal with patients whose experience doesn’t match theirs.
Black patients understand this. Stories are rampant, both in academic studies and in everyday life, of misdiagnosis and undertreatment for Black people experiencing mental health issues. This includes Black people who are struggling with severe depression being misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and Black mothers, who are at a greater risk for postpartum depression, being less likely to receive care. Problems with diagnosis or treatment are fueled by persistent stereotypes of Black people as angry, dangerous, overly emotional, and impervious to pain, or, paradoxically, so strong and resourceful that they don’t need help.
Mistreatment of African Americans in the mental health field dates back centuries. During the transatlantic slave trade, Black men were described as having “primitive psychological organization” that made them “uniquely fitted for bondage,” according to the authors Alexander Thomas and Samuel Sillen in their 1972 book, Racism and Psychiatry. One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, known as the father of American psychiatry, believed that Black people suffered from a medical affliction called Negritude, which he described as a “disorder” akin to a mild form of leprosy. With his insistence that enslaved Blacks suffered from drapetomania—a mental illness that caused them to attempt escape—Dr. Samuel Cartwright of New Orleans may be added to the list of physicians and medical “experts” who used science to claim that Black people were mentally deficient.
Fast-forward a century: in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement and at a time of increased Black leadership in political, academic, and corporate spaces, the scientific community began to describe schizophrenia as a violent social disease that afflicted Negro men. A 1968 article in the publication Archives of General Psychiatry described schizophrenia as a “protest psychosis” in which Black men developed “hostile and aggressive feelings.” As schizophrenia came to be seen as synonymous with antisocial, violent Black men, the association was used as justification for laws that treated mental illness as a criminal, not medical, condition. Rehabilitation was swapped out for efforts to control Black men through law enforcement. Black men are still four times more likely than white men to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to an often-cited 2019 Rutgers University study; the researchers concluded that clinicians put more emphasis on psychotic than on depressive symptoms in African Americans, leading to an overuse of diagnoses of schizophrenia. Consequently, Black men are also underdiagnosed with post-traumatic stress and mood disorders.
Untreated mental illness can make African Americans more vulnerable to substance abuse, homelessness, suicide, and homicide. And this begins with Black youth. Between 1991 and 2017, suicide attempts decreased among teens in every ethnic group except for African Americans. Instead, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Pediatrics, suicide attempts among Black children and teenagers increased by 73 percent. Among Black boys specifically, attempts climbed 122 percent during the same time period.
Over the years, as she grappled with mental health issues, Audrey Brianne felt an overwhelming sense of shame, which she kept tucked away. It took her years to ask for help because she felt that if she did, she couldn’t maintain the image of the strong Black woman who was resilient against anything. If she succumbed to the depression, she believed, she was letting down the Black community. She also feared she’d lose the business she started in 2011 if her clients knew she was so depressed. Her tenuous place in predominantly white Hollywood magnified the anxiety. But eventually, overwhelmed and afraid, she asked for support. In 2018, after she hung up with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, she picked up the phone and called her mother and told her, “Mommy, I need help.”
With her parents’ assistance, she found an inpatient facility in Arizona where she was treated for secondary PTSD as a result of the murder of her friend and substance abuse. She told her clients she was taking a “hiatus.” At the facility, where she remained for forty-five days, she was the only Black person in a population of more than two hundred patients. She understands that most people, especially most Black people, can’t afford the treatment her parents paid for—roughly the equivalent of a four-year college education. “It’s not fair,” she says. “There’s this whole other group and community that have the same kind of struggles and hurts that isn’t even being represented in the room. Mental health care should be free.”
After rehab, when Audrey returned to Los Angeles, she didn’t trust herself to avoid drinking and moved into a sober-living house, which prohibited substance use of any kind, monitoring patients with urine samples and Breathalyzer tests. She then moved back into her own home, but continued outpatient treatment that involved daily group and individual therapy. When I spoke to her in 2021, she was stable with the help of psychiatric medication, had returned to work, and hadn’t touched alcohol in two years.
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Black men are even less likely to recognize mental illness and seek treatment; the intersection of race and masculinity puts pressure on them to conform to traditional gender norms of toughness, fearlessness, and invulnerability to pain. And in both Black men and Black women, but men especially, the crossroads where race, uncontrolled mental illness, and law enforcement meet has become particularly dangerous. The story of Mark McMullen offers a tragic illustration.
Over Labor Day weekend in 2011, it seemed as though Mark’s life was finally headed in the right direction. He had recently married and was an attentive father to his young son, Simon. A talented chef who had discovered a passion for cooking as a boy, Mark had spent two years at the Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute in Chicago and had amassed extensive experience working in professional kitchens across the country. In 1993, he even helped prepare a gala dinner for Julia Child in honor of her eightieth birthday that was covered by The New York Times and aired on PBS. In early September 2011, Mark’s mother, Gloria, had organized a family gathering in part to honor her youngest son and to show support for and celebrate his new life. After a trip to Lake Compounce amusement park in Bristol, Connecticut, Mark and his parents, wife, son, sister, niece, and two uncles returned to the McMullen family home in Middletown, Connecticut, to continue the festivities. Sitting at the kitchen table where decades ago he had served meals to his older siblings after school by throwing together whatever was in the fridge, he excitedly shared plans for the Copper Lobster. He hoped to open this restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard, where he had spent time during the summers of his childhood and later as an adult. Best of all, he promised—swore—that after seven stints at rehab centers, and several periods of incarceration for misconduct related to addiction, his battle with drugs, which he used to ease the terror associated with bipolar disorder, had finally ended. His mother, his ride or die in his more than two-decade battle with mental illness and addiction, finally allowed herself a sliver of hope.
But the restaurant never happened, and his family never got the chance to say goodbye. Mark’s wife, Kety, would never see him alive again, and their son was destined to grow up not knowing his father. Beginning Tuesday evening September 6, Mark’s drug use, complicated by mental illness, came hurtling back and intersected tragically with Boston police officers operating outside their jurisdiction. On Wednesday, September 7, Mark McMullen was shot to death surrounded by a wall of police vehicles. While Mark, unarmed, was sitting inside his father’s car, the Boston PD officer Christopher Carr opened fire at point-blank range, striking him in the arms and chest. Carr and another officer were subsequently cleared of all charges, and Carr was later rewarded for murdering Mark.
How did Mark McMullen, the forty-four-year-old son of a university professor, from a close-knit African American family of strivers, who was more sick than dangerous, end up in a fatal altercation with police and become a statistic in a death scroll of African Americans murdered by the police?
The fundamental answer is that behavior caused by mental illness is far too often treated as a crime. Forty percent of adults with serious mental illnesses will come into contact with the criminal justice system during their lives, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Individuals with severe mental illnesses generate no less than one in ten calls for police service and occupy at least one in five of America’s prison and jail beds. Jails and prisons hold more people with serious mental illnesses—several hundred thousand individuals—than hospitals. Most are charged with minor misdemeanor crimes and low-level felonies directly tied to their psychiatric illnesses.
Yet once in police custody, the outcome for a Black suspect with mental illness is too often dire. By all accounts, including databases of fatal police encounters kept by The Washington Post and The Guardian, one in four fatal encounters ends the life of an individual with severe mental illness. At this rate, the risk of being killed during a police encounter is sixteen times greater for individuals with untreated mental illness than for other civilians approached or stopped by officers.
Add to this that Black people in general are more likely than others to be killed by police during encounters with law enforcement, its own public health crisis. According to Mapping Police Violence, a website that tracks information on police violence and use of force, Black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by the police compared with whites and 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed when they are. The deadly through line of all these statistics is that the mentally ill person pulled into the criminal justice system and harmed or killed by law enforcement is disproportionately likely to be Black and most commonly is a Black man.
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Mark McMullen was born in Boston, the youngest of Ronald and Gloria McMullen’s three children. Allen, Ronald’s son from an earlier relationship, sometimes stayed with the family. In 1970, the McMullens moved to Middletown, where Ronald, a lifelong educator en route to a doctorate in applied behavioral science, was hired as assistant director of Wesleyan University’s Upward Bound program, which offered college readiness support for first-generation students and those from racial, ethnic, and economic groups underrepresented in higher education. The family eventually settled in a two-story, three-bedroom colonial house on East Street in a pastoral area of Middletown. The suburban community was about 80 percent white at the time, in sharp contrast to Roxbury, where the children had been born, and Mattapan, where the family had moved from. The racial fit was sometimes uncomfortable for the family.
The adjustment was easiest for Mark, who was a toddler when the McMullens relocated. By the time he started kindergarten, it was clear that Mark’s upbeat personality and creative spirit would serve him well for bridging the racial divide. He made friends easily. Mark’s older siblings, who remember sometimes feeling lonely, isolated, and unwelcome in Middletown, both marveled and made fun of the ragtag crew of friends their baby brother collected and played with. They called his boys the FOACs—“fresh out of the cradle,” since most were younger than Mark. Outgoing, personable, energetic, and engaged, he liked to swim, ski, bowl, and draw. Mark loved animals, including the assortment of McMullen family pets, a cat, a gerbil, goldfish, turtles, and a dog named Augie. In later life, he gave up eating meat because he cared about animals so much. Mark was a Cub Scout, and one year the car he made won the Pinewood Derby.
Cooking, however, was Mark’s passion, even as a young child. In early 1978, Gloria McMullen returned to work after years of raising her children and taking care of the home. That meant that when the bus dropped off Chris and Karen from high school, and Mark from middle school, they waited for their parents to get home, often hungry for a snack. All of the McMullens tell the same story about Mark: While his older siblings would open the refrigerator, look inside, and complain that there was nothing to eat, when Mark looked in the fridge, he saw possibility. “We would hear him in the kitchen banging around and he’d come in with spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread,” recalls Karen McMullen, laughing. “We’re like, ‘Where’d you get that?’ He’s like, ‘I made it. Want some?’ ”
During middle school, though, Mark’s wild energy became too large for the small town, and he began to get into trouble. It started with low-level misconduct—shooting at parked cars with a BB gun and being disruptive in school. His parents switched him from Keigwin Middle School to a private school that eventually asked him to leave. In 1982, on his sister’s high school graduation day, Mark took his mother’s car and wrecked it. His parents became increasingly alarmed by their youngest son’s behavior and also worried about his drawings. His sketches were well executed, his talent apparent, but they were frightening. His mother describes the artwork as “dark”—pencil drawings of muscular warriors, their faces demonic and contorted in rage. In a yellowed sketch pad, Mark had drawn a series of angry figures, one robotic, another a severed torso; at the top of the page he wrote, “I killed them, yes, I killed all of them.”
Mark’s distressed parents took their fifteen-year-old son to a therapist in the area in 1982. Ronald McMullen, with his background in psychology, was particularly insistent that they get their son psychological testing. Gloria can’t recall what the therapist told them about Mark, but it wasn’t helpful. Years later, as an adult and in the throes of drug addiction, Mark visited another mental health professional, who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. But he was never given consistent treatment. Gloria rummages through boxes and boxes of files she’s amassed documenting the decades she spent trying to understand what was going on with her youngest son and trying to help him. But she can’t find among the medical records that scrap of paper that confirmed Mark’s bipolar diagnosis.
Looking at the past backward through the clear-eyed lens of history, the signs were all there. His manic, “up” phases were most obvious. At the time, though, his family believed that Mark’s emotional intensity, seductive charm, feelings of invincibility, impulsivity, risk taking, nonstop ideas—many unrealized—bursts of creative activity, and boundless talking were just part of who he was. One of the boxes in the McMullen attic is stuffed with notebooks full of menus for restaurants Mark dreamed of starting. There are lists of recipes, in his scratchy handwriting, that he hoped to prepare and serve. One spiral binder contains several dozen dishes listed at the top of blank pages—Bacon Leek Quiche, Roast Beet Salad, Sweet Pea Beurre Blanc, Duck Confit with Brussels Sprouts and Mustard Sauce. In his cooking diary, he jotted down food preparation mistakes that needed correcting, reminding himself to pay attention to the neatness of his plates and avoid too much butter in the Trout Meunière. He scribbled the names of chefs he admired, a jumbled list of ingredients, an idea for a fundraiser. Another notebook contains a film treatment for “Shang: In the Eyes of the Dragon,” with a road map for getting the movie in his head produced—a list of agents, producers, the addresses of the Screen Actors and Writers Guilds. After placing the files on a table in the backyard, Gloria closed the flaps on the box and shook her head.
Karen remembers her brother’s exuberance and lust for life. His energy would always burn brightly at the beginning but eventually burst into flames. Looking back on it, that behavior now seems to his sister like the mania of bipolar disorder. In the late 1990s, Mark moved to New York City and lived with her and his niece, Avery, in Brooklyn. For the first several months, he added Technicolor to their quiet life. As he was getting settled into New York City, Mark volunteered at God’s Love We Deliver, an organization that brings meals to people living with HIV/AIDS. Unlike her brother, Karen, a film editor, didn’t like to cook, so Mark prepared and served meals and even threw dinner parties for her friends. “I had been living in that house ten years and never had a dinner party,” she recalls. “But Mark was like, you buy, I’ll fry. We’d shimmy together some tables, I’d invite my friends, and he’d make these really fabulous meals. It was super fun.”
When it came time for Mark to get a job, he told his sister, “You start at the top.” Mark bought a Zagat restaurant guide and started calling around, pitching himself to the city’s four-star restaurants. He didn’t get a job at New York’s No. 1 restaurant at the time, the Four Seasons, but Chanterelle, also four-star, hired him as a sous-chef after he volunteered to work for free for two weeks. He lasted almost two years. Mark told his sister, “I can get jobs and women. I can’t keep them, but I know how to get them.” Mark worked at more than two dozen restaurants throughout his life—from Chanterelle to McDonald’s.
Mark’s family and friends struggle to remember his downs. Like many of those who live with bipolar disorder, at first he hid the depression and later self-medicated with drugs. When the mania wore off, replaced by a depression that sapped his energy, creativity, joy, and spirit—the typical yin and yang of the disease—he created his own fix, chasing away the sadness with a drug high. His parents got a hint that Mark was suffering from some kind of depression after he left home to attend Chamberlayne Junior College in Boston in 1985. He made it a year. When Gloria and Ronald went to visit him, they found their son wasn’t attending classes but sleeping all day.
It is clear that Mark did seek psychological help—over and over. In the files Gloria kept for her son, there are the names of several dozen mental health professionals who saw and treated Mark—psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors—and many more names and numbers. Records from his jail stays show that Mark was receiving mental health treatment while incarcerated and at one point was taking medication for depression, Tourette’s syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. At another point his distraught mother sought therapy, blaming herself for her son’s condition.
Why didn’t Mark’s father, who studied behavioral science and eventually taught an undergraduate psychology class at Wesleyan, take a more active role in his son’s mental illness? Gloria believes that her husband, who battled his way out of the Roxbury projects to earn his doctorate and secured a good job at a majority-white, elite college, simply didn’t want to see what was happening with Mark. “Did his father get his undergraduate degree in psychology? Yes,” says Gloria in her no-nonsense “pahk the cah” Boston accent. “Did he go to the national Association of Black Psychologists convention every year? Yes. Did he get psychiatric support for his son? No.” Ronald passed away in 2019.
“God bless him,” she continues quietly. “I think he didn’t want his colleagues to know that his son had issues with addiction and needed psychiatric help. I think also, to be perfectly honest, we keep the emotions to ourselves in our family, but I guess I should’ve known.”
Although the rate of those with bipolar disorder is the same for Black Americans as for other racial groups, the mental health condition can be significantly more dangerous for African Americans. Bipolar disorder, a brain condition that affects an estimated 2.3 million Americans, causes extreme shifts in mood, energy, and ability to function. These mood swings leave a person feeling very high—the manic phase—or low, the depressive phase. During mania, someone may experience excessive energy, increased activity, and a feeling of euphoria, as well as an inability to concentrate or sleep. These feelings heighten the chance of dangerous sexual behavior or use of drugs during this phase. It is during manic episodes that people may feel great bursts of creativity, and many of them balk at taking the mood-stabilizing medication necessary to control bipolar disorder, fearful that their creative impulses will be deadened. Depressive episodes are characterized by sadness, anxiety, pessimism, and hopelessness, as well as a loss of interest in pleasurable activities and difficulty concentrating. There may also be thoughts of death or suicide.
As potentially debilitating as bipolar disorder can be, it can be managed with psychotherapy and medication, allowing people to control their mood swings and lead fulfilling lives. Yet too often Black people are not diagnosed properly, leaving them without treatment. Research suggests that clinicians put more emphasis on manic than depressive symptoms in African Americans, which skews diagnoses toward schizophrenia even when these patients show similar symptoms as white patients. A 2014 study by University of California, Berkeley, researchers examined bipolar disorder treatment for Black and white Americans and found that Black people were misdiagnosed more often—typically with schizophrenia. Additionally, even with a proper diagnosis, Black people received less intensive treatment, leaving them less capable of leading stable and productive lives.
In Gloria McMullen’s dusty boxes, she has dozens of files cataloging her son’s attempts to kick his addiction to crack, his drug-related entanglements with law enforcement, and the money the family spent on rehab. Beginning in the late 1990s, Mark was in and out of drug rehabilitation—three stays for three weeks each at Rushford in Middletown and help at two facilities in other parts of Connecticut. He enrolled at Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Chicago and at St. Jude Retreats in Upstate New York. Despite addiction that was clearly severe, none of his seven stays in rehab lasted longer than just over a month. Money was at least part of the reason; rehab, medical bills, paying off drug debt, and other expenses related to Mark’s substance abuse were draining his parents’ savings. They spent at least several thousand dollars each time he received residential treatment; his longest stay, five weeks from May to July 2006 at the New York facility, cost his family $10,000.
Without question, Mark did not want to be an addict and was using drugs as his own form of medicine. He made a Herculean effort to recover. Between rehab stays, he attended Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings, and when he was incarcerated, Mark generally attended group and individual therapy. He left behind a handwritten paper trail of remorse, shame, and regret—journal entries, thank-you cards, apology notes, letters to judges and the parole board. In 2009, he tearfully told his mother, “I just want to be normal,” begged forgiveness for his relapses, and thanked her for not giving up on him. That was also the year that Gloria McMullen created a recovery plan for herself. She attended meetings of Nar-Anon, a 12-step recovery program for friends and families of addicts. She wondered if she was an “enabler” and made a list of things that she would no longer do for her son, including give him money. She reminded herself that Mark was a drug addict and not in control. “I am not dealing with Mark, but the ‘monster’ within, ‘the thing.’ ” She read up on Tough Love and looked into attending meetings. “Tough Love wasn’t for me,” says Gloria now. “I know a woman in Middletown who took the Tough Love approach, when her son was going through what Mark was going through.”
She pauses. “I don’t know if that would have made a difference, but her son is still alive, running a halfway house. My son is dead.”
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Black Americans who use drugs are disproportionately criminalized when they struggle with addiction. While Black adults in the United States use drugs at a rate about the same as or lower than their white counterparts, they are two and a half times more likely to be arrested for drug possession, per a 2016 joint study from Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. In Montana, Iowa, and Vermont, that disparity rises to more than six times; Minnesota, the epicenter of protests against policing in 2020, is right behind them, with Black adults nearly six times more likely to be arrested for drug possession than white adults.
That’s not by accident and it’s not new. In 1971, President Nixon fired the opening shots in the so-called war on drugs. It wasn’t long before the national jail and prison population swelled from 300,000 to 2.3 million, with fully half the people incarcerated in federal facilities remanded on drug charges. The kicker: two-thirds of them were people of color, their lives interrupted by disproportionate policing. Perhaps the best way to observe the gap is to examine the ways people are prosecuted based on the drugs that fell them. In 1986, the Anti–Drug Abuse Act put in place sentencing known as the hundred-to-one cocaine-to-crack disparity, under which the distribution of five grams of crack—the less expensive form of cocaine associated with Black communities—carried a minimum sentence of five years. But someone, typically a white someone, would have to be caught with five hundred grams of cocaine before they would meet the same fate. Decades after the fact, Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman disclosed that his administration intentionally used drug policy to vilify and criminalize Black people and quell protest. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Little has changed when it comes to criminalization. While the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act reduced the disparity to eighteen to one—still a problem—the opioid crisis that plagues America has uncovered separate and unequal treatment for Black and white people suffering with addiction. The contradiction is stark. Where white people are offered sympathy and medical care and profiles in national newspapers, Black people are treated like criminals. It takes only a quick look at the news to see how the nation perceives the addicted. In fact, a 2017 analysis of the media found journalists running stories like “Painkiller Use Breeds New Face of Heroin Addiction,” actively rebranding the narrative of addiction and sounding an alarm that people “just like us,” presumably white and middle class, are suddenly at risk. In many of the stories highlighted by the report, Black Americans struggling with drug addiction are portrayed as people to fear and lock away. The events that led them to use drugs are downplayed in favor of whatever is deemed criminal about their behavior. Whites who abuse opioids are represented as victims of addiction whose lives are worthy of medical care and rehabilitation. Their life stories are laid out, the events that led to their downfall relayed as a cautionary—and redemptive—tale.
Federal spending also reveals unequal treatment: in 1986, as the crack epidemic surged, a quarter of the $1.74 billion in federal money tied to the Anti–Drug Abuse Act was set aside for programs that aimed to prevent drug use and treat patients; the rest was dedicated to enforcement and incarceration. But when it comes to opioids, the opposite is true: in 2018, 75 percent of the $7.4 billion congressional budget earmarked to respond to the opioid crisis had been set aside for treatment, and just 16 percent was earmarked for law enforcement.
In the fall of 2011, Mark swore again that he was going to turn his life around. This time his family allowed themselves to believe him. Five years earlier, in 2006, Gloria had taken her sister, their cousins, Karen, Chris, and Mark to Cape Verde, her father’s homeland, to unite her American family with their African relatives. While there, Mark met Maria Santa, who worked as a cook for one of his Cape Verdean family members. He was intrigued by this beautiful woman with large eyes full of warmth and longing who spoke very little English, and she was captivated by the charming American man who loved to cook. After he returned home, Mark spent two years trying to get his new love, who goes by the name Kety, into the United States. Mark went to Senator Joe Lieberman, who eventually granted Kety a petition to immigrate. She married Mark in 2008 and in mid-July 2010, their son, Simon, was born. Fatherhood didn’t heal Mark, but being a parent changed him. By all accounts, he was an enthusiastic, loving dad to Simon. In the first months of his son’s life, Mark woke up early to give him baths, play with him, read to him, and take him to museums. He did the cooking, cleaning, and laundry to allow Kety time to grow into motherhood.
Still, his struggles with drugs and mental illness persisted. After he fell off the wagon and descended into a drug binge, he scribbled a note to Kety. “I do love you! I am sick. I am going to the doctor in Connecticut. I will be home tonight. Please be here. I am getting help. I need your help and support. By help, I mean every day.”
In 2011, Mark was arrested for a parole violation. He begged to be placed in a diversionary program where he could receive intensive drug treatment and psychotherapy, attend 12-step meetings, and be attached to a system to monitor his psych meds. In a letter to the court, he wrote, “Since the birth of my son, I realized that I could make the world a better place and had resolved to do so. I intend to be the best possible roll [sic] model for my son on a daily basis. Showing him how to face problems and overcome them and how to live a life of service.” Instead, Mark was sentenced to six months at Norfolk County House of Correction in Dedham, Massachusetts. During that time, he received no therapy or medication and resorted to doubling down by himself on a self-directed recovery program. He promised to take responsibility for his actions, wrote extensive lists of people from whom he should seek forgiveness—his wife, son, parents, and siblings at the top. He made financial restitution for his previous crimes and sketched out a drug relapse prevention plan.
A month after Mark’s release, his mother planned the Labor Day family party. Generally, Gloria would drive her son to Boston, where he was staying at a Salvation Army halfway house, and then spend the night with her daughter-in-law and grandson in Quincy or circle back home. But after the family events, she didn’t feel up to the two-hour-plus drive. Despite a nagging worry, she lent her son her husband’s burgundy Hyundai. On September 6, Mark delivered Kety and Simon home safely, gave his son a bath, and cooked dinner for his wife, but never made it to the halfway house. The following day, Gloria McMullen received the news every mother dreads: your son is dead. The police didn’t bother to let Kety know her husband had been killed; a close family friend drove to her house and delivered the news.
According to the police report and subsequent investigation, on Wednesday morning, September 7, two plainclothes Boston police officers patrolling an area of Roxbury known for drug activity saw Mark sitting in a car with a woman they said was a prostitute and drug user. When they approached the car, Mark drove away, leaving the woman behind. With guns pointed at him, he began a high-speed chase that involved dozens of both Boston and Massachusetts state police. He hit several police and other vehicles along the way until he ended up on a grass median at exit 14 of Route 3 in Rockland, nearly twenty miles from Roxbury. At that point, Mark was unarmed in the badly damaged Hyundai, with the airbag deployed, surrounded by about a dozen police cars and emergency vehicles. According to the official version, as Mark revved the engine, causing his tires to spin in the wet grass, Boston and state police officers approached his car. One of them, Christopher Carr, positioned himself in front of the Hyundai and, with his gun drawn, ordered Mark to stop. What the report says happened next makes little sense. Carr claims that Mark lurched his vehicle forward, in Carr’s direction. He insists that Mark attempted to mow him down, and fearing for his life, Carr somehow managed to move from the front of the Hyundai to the driver’s side and fire four times, hitting Mark in the arms and chest. Next—after Mark was shot (five times, according to the autopsy)—the official report becomes even stranger: “Mr. McMullen continued to physically resist and refused to comply with commands being issued by the officers. He was taken from the vehicle and after a struggle was handcuffed. At that point officers observed what appeared to be gunshots in Mr. McMullen’s chest and neck area.” Eventually, he was taken to South Shore Hospital and pronounced dead at 12:45 p.m.
The shocked and grief-stricken McMullen family disputed this official story, which common sense would assume was untrue. If Christopher Carr, standing in front of the Hyundai, feared for his life, how did he manage to move to the side of the car and kill Mark at point-blank range? If he was afraid of the lurching vehicle, why not shoot through the windshield—which was intact after the incident? Mark had been shot a number of times; how could he resist arrest and require handcuffs to be subdued? And why did the officers, who presumably had seen Carr shoot Mark—they were all standing there—only later “observe what appeared to be gunshots”? How could they not notice he was wounded and bleeding out?
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Audrey Brianne has made a delicate peace with the mental illness she has lived with for so long. When she stepped back from styling to begin rehab, most of her clients understood she needed some time off, and she was able to keep her business’s doors open with the help of assistants. As the entertainment industry recovers from the pandemic, her business is up and running, but she’s clocking far fewer hours and servicing a smaller roster of clients. To maintain emotional balance, she belongs to a number of groups—AA, an alumni group from rehab, and a recovery circle of people who have experienced trauma. She says the camaraderie, accountability, and sharing of experiences steady her. She is an advocate for psychiatric medication and takes a cocktail of seven pills every morning. To fight the stigma surrounding mental health in the Black community, she is sharing her story. “When I discuss medication, I hear people say, ‘That’s white people talk,’ ” she says. “ ‘You don’t need all that medicine to feel okay. Just get some fresh air or pray on it.’ But you can’t pray depression away.” When she goes deeper into her suicide attempt and describes the darkness of severe depression on podcasts and at events, she often strikes a chord in her audience. She says the positive feedback has been surprising, rewarding, and empowering.
Mark McMullen’s story doesn’t have a sunny ending. The Plymouth County DA’s office conducted an investigation, determining that Mark had posed an immediate deadly threat to Carr and other officers, who were justified in killing him in cold blood. Seven months after the report and a year after Mark’s death, the McMullens and activists held a rally in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston, demanding justice. A flyer, with a smiling Mark holding Simon on his lap, asked, “Why Was Mark Shot?” In 2013, the Boston Police Department, apparently in an effort to derail the McMullen family’s wrongful-death lawsuit, which was dragging through court, awarded Carr the department’s highest honor, the Schroeder Brothers Memorial Medal, for the very incident that ended in the one-sided massacre of Mark McMullen.
Immediately following Mark’s death, the McMullen family put in a request to get back the contents of the car he was murdered in. It took eight years for the police to respond. In January 2019, when the Massachusetts State Police finally released Mark’s things, among the items was a copper recovery chip marking seven months of sobriety, a brochure with tips for staying clean and sober, a list of Cocaine Anonymous meetings in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, and signed proof that he had attended weekly AA and NA meetings, the last one shortly before he died. Most heartbreaking, he had scrawled on a piece of paper torn from a yellow pad a note to his son, who was just over a year old at the time of his father’s death. Mark had been incarcerated for Simon’s first birthday and lost track of the note before he could deliver it. “You have successfully completed one year of life,” Mark wrote, in all caps. “Congratulations, you’ve done a great job! You’re on your way to a wonderful childhood. At this pace in one year, you will be two years old.”