In partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), Audacy presents a new episode in our I'm Listening: Talk Away the Dark limited series featuring host Dr. Maria Boynton, along with her guests, Vic Armstrong and Sarah Dixon-Hackey.

Dr. Boynton is a recipient of the Obama and Biden Presidential Lifetime Achievement Awards which honor those in our nation who exhibit outstanding character, work ethic, and dedication to their communities. Dr. Boynton is also a member of the Georgia Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame and is named among Atlanta's Top 100 Black Women of Influence by the Atlanta Business League.

In this episode, Dr. Boynton is joined by AFSP Expert Vic Armstrong, and Sarah Dixon-Hackey, M.B.A. who currently serves as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Liaison for Clay County Public Health working to identify and bridge health gaps for under-served populations. She is an approved Trainer for the AFSP’s “More Than Sad” suicide prevention training for parents and educators and is a certified Mental Health First Aid Trainer, a nationally recognized program by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing.

“We're starting to see some progress, but there's still a long way to go,” Armstrong says about how he has witnessed the community’s acceptance blossom around mental health discussions. “I grew up in a community where both my Black community and my faith-based community really kind of ingrained in me that suicide and mental health challenges were not things that impacted my community and that if they did impact my community, as a person of faith, my remedy should be more faith that I should be able to pray about it, that I should be able to talk to God about it. But there was never a conversation about talk of mental health professionals.”

“I think one of the things that I've come to learn later though, now that I am in this space is that while there was the narrative within my community that was reinforced by my community about mental health and suicide not being things that impacted us, there was also a reinforcement of that message coming from outside the community by the simple fact that the organizations that specialized in this field -- the organizations that specialize in suicide prevention, the organizations that specialize in mental health -- were not reaching into my community saying ‘No, this is about you.’ We want to provide resources that are relevant to your community. And so what that tended to do was that it reinforced that my message must be correct, my narrative must be correct, and my narrative was a narrative that really was based on misinformation or lack of information.”

“Part of what I've learned since then too is that if you want to break a lot of that stigma, institutions like faith-based organizations and Black and Brown communities can be very instrumental in doing that and I think really have a responsibility because of the relationship to the community, to help us to really fix a lot of those historical challenges that our communities have faced.”

“I think there's a couple of different experiences,” Dixon-Hackey adds. Recalling her own small town upbringing she says, “I would look at one from… a racial minority kind of perspective because I lived and was raised by a white family. And so a lot of their values or all their values are really passed on to me and much of that was based around the church. And I think just our community in general is a small town, but I think because of that we really live by this principle of not really talking about our issues, not really addressing or acknowledging those deeper emotional kind of themes. That really translated into how I saw mental health, even with my own personal struggles… it really shaped how I address things until much later in life.”

“I think for me personally,” Sarah admits, “a lot of my values came from this idea of keeping everything… in the dark very much, keeping it to yourself and knowing that we don't deal with those things in public. Those are private, behind the closed doors -- and you certainly don't talk about them with anyone else.”

“I still am struggling,” she says, “finding, I think, a sense of what the Asian community's perspective is because I was so isolated in my own experience. I can literally count on one hand the number of minorities that I was raised around in my young time. I truly believe that it wasn't until I hit my thirties that I saw this acknowledgment of even wanting to look outside of the majority because I spent so much time really wanting to be part of the larger majority, wanting to be part of, and fall into, that group.”

“We look at the US as making a lot of progress as we have this openness of conversation and using the phrases mental health,” she adds, “and I think we have to be mindful of the fact that other communities, including those that are Asian, are not at that same point.”

“I think it is getting better,” Armstrong says, “partly because we are seeing more willingness for high-profile individuals to talk about their mental health challenge. We're seeing more celebrities, more athletes -- we're also being more thoughtful about how we reach different communities. For example, we have a partnership at AFSP with Megan the Stallion because we know that she reaches young people. So it's really thinking about those kinds of things, and how we reach the communities that way. We're also thinking differently about who are the influencers in communities, who already have that trusted relationship with the community.”

AFSP and Audacy’s Talk Away the Dark series aims to give real-world insight into how having brave and caring conversations with loved ones about mental health and suicide prevention can help save lives. Through a series of open and honest discussions with influencers and mental health experts, we’ll demonstrate the importance of talking to people directly about suicide and show how those conversations help provide hope.

Audacy's I’m Listening initiative aims to encourage those who are dealing with mental health issues to understand they are not alone. If you or anyone you know is struggling with depression or anxiety, know that someone is always there. Additionally, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 988. Find a full list of additional resources here.

Words by Joe Cingrana Interview by Dr. Maria Boynton