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DRK Beauty

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With a spike in anxiety amongst our teens and young adults, mental health is important now more than ever when it comes to protecting our younger generation. Thankfully, DRK Beauty Healing’s latest initiative, 10,000 Hours of Free Therapy, was created to alleviate stress for mothers, professional students and any woman struggling with the normalization of social distancing to help thrive as we move into the fall season. In partnership with DRK Beauty Healing, clinicians of color have dedicated 10+ hours of pro bono treatment to help address the access and attention disparity that women of color face within the mental health space.

As someone who has gone through my own mental health challenges ten years ago, mental health has become very important to me now. About a month after the pandemic hit, I woke up one morning with high levels of anxiety because I was worried about how the virus was going to impact Black and Brown communities and how the mental health fallout would be huge,” founder Wilma Mae admitted to HelloBeautiful about the inspiration behind the mental health initiative. “Communities of color are already at a disadvantage at almost every level of society. DRK Beauty’s core mission is about empowering our community, so I felt compelled to create an initiative that would help as quickly and as easily as possible.”

Since its launch on May 15th, DRK Beauty Healing has partnered with award-winning actress Cynthia Ervio and began a fundraising campaign to raise $1M to continue its mission of providing mental health resources to women of color. Wilma Mae exclusively told HelloBeautiful about her desire to mend bridges of accessibility for women of color seeking therapy through DRK Beauty Healing. “The intent behind DRK Beauty Healing is for the process of seeking therapy to be as easy and smooth as possible for Black women and for people in the Black community to feel more comfortable with tending to their mental health,” she said to HelloBeautiful.

She concluded on the importance of therapy for women of color during COVID-19 by sharing with us her personal experiences with depression and mental health. “When I suffered from severe depression, I didn’t know that I had depression. I didn’t know anything about the illness or that therapy could be helpful in not only identifying it but also how best to deal with it,” she shared exclusively. “I hope that women of color who have been suffering during these past few months because of COVID-19 and the ongoing racial injustice will opt to use our service–if even to have one session. Our suffering is real and there is help out there and it is only an email away.”

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DRK Beauty Healing Launches Back-To-School Initiative With 10,000 Hours Of Free Therapy  was originally published on hellobeautiful.com