Black River Counselling

Black River Counselling Service exist to meet the mental health and wellbeing needs of the Black Community at this exceedingly difficult time. Black River Counselling Service does so by providing culturally specific counselling for Black People by Black Counsellors & Psychotherapists, at a time when trust in mainstream institutions is very low for this community.

It is an important provision at this time that came into being not only because of the harsh treatment from racism, discrimination, and police brutality, which was highlighted in 2020 with the publicised death of George Floyd by law enforcement but also during this time of the emergent statistic by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that Black people are up to four times more likely to die with COVID-19 than their white counterparts. This new analysis published on Thursday 20^th May, showed black women are more likely to die by a factor of 4.3 and black men by 4.2 compared to Caucasian people, after adjusting for age.

The black community has already been recognised historically as not accessing preventative services, especially talking therapies. Black River counselling aims to remedy this by being culturally specific and as such has already helped so many black people to date.

Culturally specific services such as these are much-needed at this time and going forward, especially with gun and knife crime and loss of young black lives are already at pandemic proportions, and has been for a number of years now, and shows no sign of slowing down, even at this Corona Virus Pandemic time. It is time to start truly addressing black mental health. All age groups in this community are impacted at this time. It is a time of emergency.

Black mental health matters and being able to talk to counsellors who understand the black experience is a mental wellbeing enhancer. It has had a particularly good uptake as the word has spread in the black community.

Black River Counselling Service is funded by The Fishmongers’ Company.