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Look: Black Men's Mental Health Is Trending Because of Kid Cudi and This Hashtag

Many are thanking the singer and expressing themselves with #YouGoodMan posts.

This week, Kid Cudi revealed that he would be checking himself into a facility to aid with his depression and suicidal thoughts. To some, his announcement and openness about mental health may not seem extraordinary. Yet to the Black community it was monumental.

Whether you care to admit it or not, Black people, specifically Black men, have never quite had a safe moment to openly discuss mental health. The assumption is that with so much life adversity, you need to remain strong and keep it together to protect yourself and others.

Not to mention the fact that speaking about mental health in a way that suggests you need help can appear emasculating.

However, when Kid Cudi opened the doors to Black mental health, the world stepped right on through.

Dayna Lynn Nuckolls and her friend, who only goes by his Twitter handle, @TheCosby, knew this was an opportune time to keep the discussion going. After the announcement, Nuckolls was so inspired she contacted @TheCosby and brainstormed the perfect hashtag, #YouGoodMan.

“I had just been having a conversation with a Black man close to me about getting professional help about his trauma,” she said. “When I saw that someone with so much to gain but also so much to lose in sharing something personal like that came forward, it made me happy because it opened the door and gave others permission to do the same.”

@TheCosby could personally relate to the feeling of having nowhere to turn, and he knew this would be an opportune moment to create a safe space for all Black men.

“Hypermasculinity calls for us to act like it’s OK,” he told Buzzfeed News. “We get [a mental illness] as children, it continues as adults, and it causes us to die young. It sends us to prison, sends us to the hospitals because we don’t talk about it. I think that the more normalized mental health care, even if it’s not professional, will help.”

Check out some of the incredible shared comments or share your own #yougoodman story in the comment section. 

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