2021 Fellow

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Ewune Ewane

Minds Over Melanin

As the United States becomes increasingly diverse and the stigma of mental health declines, the need for competent mental health professionals who can serve racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse communities is critical. Though approximately 40 percent of the U.S. population identify as BIPOC, multicultural counseling education recently became a training requirement within the past decade. Subsequently, most experienced clinicians were trained within an euro-centric teaching model and never received multicultural training within their clinical development. Lack of cultural competency in the psychology field frequently results in misdiagnosis and medical harm due to racial bias. As an extension of Ewune’s 10-year career in psychology, she founded Minds Over Melanin, a virtual community mental health agency to guide inclusive action and address this gap in culturally competent care.

Over the course of the fellowship, Ewune will scale Minds Over Melanin to reform psychology with a racial equity and intersectional cultural lens to illuminate, comprehend, and provide culturally-informed emotional and mental care for Black, Indigeneous, and People of Color through advocacy, research, and treatment. Most notably, she is working to expand accessibility to relevant treatment literature for effective response to the continuum of diverse lived experiences.

Ewune’s work will addresses inequality in mental health by seeking to eliminate the barriers that contribute to oppressive, systemic efforts such as under-funding of BIPOC-focused research, strained community-based relationships, low acceptance of BIPOC-focused studies in academic journals, and limited access to published works for continued education that would benefit communities of color.

The purpose of this work is to see those who are unseen and to hear those who are unheard. With listening, learning, and professional humility we can address racism and discrimination experienced in psychological treatment. Through the efforts of Minds Over Melanin, we are fostering the development of safe spaces for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to process their emotional and mental experiences and heal without harm.

–Ewune Ewane