By Alex Bass
Alex.bass@triangletribune.com
RALEIGH – April Simpkins signed copies of the book she co-authored, or actually completed for her daughter, Cheslie Kryst, in the Thomas J. Boyd Chapel on Shaw’s campus. “By The Time You Read This,” the book’s title and the beginning of Kryst’s text-message-turned-suicide note to her mother on Jan. 30, 2022, has made the New York Times’ bestseller list and is a finalist for a NAACP Image Award for literature.
Simpkins, who introduces herself as a mental health advocate and founder of the foundation bearing Kryst’s name, still has chapters to write by speaking to listening audiences.
“Self-care is not selfish. It is necessary,” Simpkins said. She acknowledged a prevailing myth about people like Kryst, who distinguished herself as an attorney, news correspondent, a student-athlete, and Miss North Carolina USA and Miss USA 2019.
“That did not have any impact on her struggle with her mental health,” Simpkins continued.
The Jan. 26 program, sponsored by the Raleigh chapter of The Links, Inc., occurred at a crossroads in time following the Jan. 20 inauguration of President Donald Trump. Chapter president Kimberly Williams said it is imperative to understand the relationship of any post-election anger some might be feeling to how people respond in word and deed.
“We have to make sure we are OK,” Williams said, “so that our action doesn’t become anger, or we end up hurting ourselves or someone else.”
Raleigh psychiatrist Nerissa Price added a statistical perspective underscoring the event’s educational mission. By age 18, Price said, 64% of individuals have had at least one adverse childhood, even traumatic experience. Reducing childhood trauma would reduce adult depression by as much as 44%. Combating these statistics begins with facilitating face-to-face, technology-free conversations with adolescents in homes and schools.
Black women – as wives and mothers, educators and community leaders – have great opportunities to model these practices. “It may start at their kitchen table in their home, but it can spread,” Price said. “People care about what they say. But we have to be educated, as well.”
Listeners, also, must be open to asking a certain question. “Asking someone if they’re suicidal does not make them suicidal,” Price said. “It’s actually one of the few times in medicine that asking a question might save someone’s life.”
Simpkins believes social media interactions can be fulfilling for mental health, but warns against becoming social media spectators because of potential in-person implications. “I do think that it has impacted and made people a little more skeptical about getting close to people who are in your purview,” she said. “There is a time to pull away.”
Williams said The Links began its Shaw partnership by answering the university’s call to integrate mental health care with the Baptist school’s spiritual roots while providing a home-like support system away from home.
Williams recalled her undergraduate days when she saw others who exemplified why that support was vital, especially for mental health. “There were students who came to college and never went back home,” she said.
Shaw Chaplain LaMont Johnson was drawn to Price’s differentiation between a savior and a supporter. The Christian faith, Johnson said, has provided a Savior. The supporter, meanwhile, is someone to join another walking in the rain and providing an umbrella.
“You don’t know where they’re on their way to,” Johnson said.
