For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When Strength Wasn’t Enuf: Reflections for Suicide Prevention Month

More than fifty years ago, Ntozake Shange gave us for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Her choreopoem gave voice to Black women’s experiences of love, violence, racism, joy, sisterhood, loss, and despair.

All these years later, I find myself thinking about the Black girls and women who are still considering suicide. The ones who passively consider, “What if I wasn’t here anymore,” and are still going to work, raising children, meeting deadlines, achieving, taking care of everybody, and showing up. The ones who are still being called “strong” while privately wondering how much longer they can keep living life as it is.

Historically, Black women have had comparatively low rates of suicide deaths, particularly when compared with Black men and White women. Researchers have explored possible protective factors including racial identity, spirituality, family relationships, motherhood, social support, and reasons for living.

And yet, living life in a Black woman’s body tells me that some of the very things named as protective can also become burdens when they are distorted by the expectations of others.

Family can be protective. But what happens when being the one who holds the family together means you never get to fall apart?

Faith can be protective. But what happens when struggling gets interpreted as not praying enough or not trusting God?

Motherhood can give us powerful reasons for living. It can also come with the message that everyone else’s needs must always come before our own.

Community can sustain us. Community can also expect us to keep showing up when we are running on empty.

I believe there is value in understanding what has helped Black women survive. I just don’t want us to confuse surviving with being okay, particularly because the numbers themselves are changing. Joseph and colleagues (2023) found that suicide rates among Black females ages 15–84 increased from 2.1 per 100,000 in 1999 to 3.4 in 2020. Among Black girls and women ages 15–24, the increase was even greater—from 1.9 to 4.9 per 100,000.

I remember Cheslie Kryst.

She was a former Miss USA, an attorney, and a television correspondent. She was beautiful, educated, accomplished—and just 30 years old. I remember the collective shock and grief surrounding her death. So many people were asking: How could this happen to her?

That question reveals something about what society believes suffering is supposed to look like. Apparently, it isn’t supposed to look accomplished. We expect suffering to announce itself. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes suffering answers emails, gets the children where they need to go, checks on everybody else, meets the deadline, serves at church, smiles for the picture, and says, “I’m fine.” Sometimes the person who is drowning is still getting everything done. There is a particular pressure that comes with believing you cannot afford to fail. The pressure comes with additional layers you didn’t ask for, or create, when you are Black and woman. 

A 2018 research study found several aspects of perfectionism to be associated with suicidal thinking. Socially prescribed perfectionism—the sense that other people require perfection from us—also predicted increases in suicidal ideation over time (Smith et al., 2018). More recent research with high-achieving Black college women adds race and gender to that conversation. The women who participated in the study described their experiences as being riddled with overcommitment, difficulty resting, burnout, pressure to do everything well, and meeting others’ expectations at the expense of their own health (read that part again, sis).

I think a lot of us know something about that.

Maybe being excellent got you noticed. Maybe achievement earned praise. Maybe being responsible made you feel safe. Maybe you learned that you couldn’t just be good—you needed to be twice as good, especially when you were one of very few Black women in the room.

There is nothing wrong with excellence. But excellence gets heavy when it becomes the price of worthiness.

I also think about Dr. Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey, a senior administrator at a university who died by suicide in 2024. Before her death, she had described experiencing bullying, racial stereotyping, and inadequate support at work while also dealing with significant mental health concerns. Her death left me, and so many of us with the question: What happens when a Black woman actually says she isn’t okay and still isn’t heard?

We tell people to ask for help as though asking guarantees that someone will listen. It doesn’t.

Research with Black women has found an association between gendered racism—the intertwined experiences of racism and sexism, sometimes described as misogynoir—and suicidal ideation (Perry et al., 2012). Context matters. Black women are not experiencing depression, anxiety, burnout, or suicidal thoughts in a vacuum. There are workplace expectations, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, etc. Then there are the expectations we have absorbed so deeply that nobody else has to say them anymore:

You should be able to handle this.

Don’t let them see you fall apart.

Everybody is depending on you.

Just push through.

You can rest later.

I know that woman. I’ve been that woman.

There is something beautiful about our capacity. There can also be a cost when our capacity becomes our identity.

Researchers call part of this the Strong Black Woman schema—cultural expectations around strength, independence, caregiving, resilience, and limiting expressions of vulnerability. Research has connected aspects of this schema with psychological distress, emotional suppression, and difficulties seeking support (Abrams et al., 2019).

I don’t believe our strength is the problem.

Our strength has helped us survive things we should never have had to survive. Our caregiving has held families and communities together. Our ambition has carried us into rooms that weren’t built with us in mind. Our faith has held many of us when there wasn’t much else to hold onto.

I honor that.

What concerns me is when strength starts requiring self-abandonment. It describes suppressing your own thoughts, emotions, and needs, often to maintain relationships or meet expectations. Research has associated self-silencing with poorer mental health among Black women, and one study among Black women living with HIV found an association with suicidality.

But you don’t need the clinical term to recognize it.

It’s needing help and deciding somebody else needs you more.

It’s being hurt and convincing yourself it wasn’t that serious.

It’s being exhausted but refusing to let anyone down, and not including yourself in that category.

It’s not being okay for months while continuing to function well enough that nobody asks twice.

And that’s what I don’t want us to miss. We cannot keep using functioning as evidence of wellness or lack of suicidal pain.

Maybe instead of only asking why Black women’s suicide rates have historically been lower, we also need to ask what those numbers have allowed us not to see.

The woman who considered suicide and never told anybody.

The woman who doesn’t necessarily want to die but cannot imagine continuing to live like this.

The woman who survived an attempt and returned to being the person everybody depends on.

The woman who is depressed and still productive.

The woman who has become so good at being needed that she doesn’t know how to admit that she needs someone, too.

Would we recognize her pain before she stopped functioning? That’s the question I keep coming back to.

If you recognize yourself anywhere in this, I want you to hear me:

You don’t have to stop functioning or have a breakdown before what you’re carrying deserves attention. You don’t have to prove that you’re suffering enough.

And not that you need my permission, but just in case you feel you need someone to give it to you:

You get to say, “I’m not doing as well as I look.”

You get to admit that something has gotten too heavy. You get to disappoint somebody. You are allowed to need more support than you’re used to receiving. And if your thoughts have moved into a place that scares you, you get to tell a trusted person that, too.

To my sisters whose faith is part of how you understand your life, needing help is not evidence that you don’t trust God enough. Prayer and therapy don’t have to compete. Faith and medication don’t have to compete. Jesus and boundaries don’t have to compete. You can be grateful for your life and overwhelmed by your life at the same time.

For a woman who has spent her life being needed, being needed cannot be the only reason we give her to stay.

So I want to offer another reason:

You.

Your life has value apart from what you produce, who you care for, how much you achieve, and how useful you are to everybody else.

Shange wrote of colored girls who had considered suicide and asked us to imagine when the rainbow might finally be enuf. I find myself wondering what enuf looks like for us now.

Maybe it isn’t more resilience. Maybe we don’t need another lesson in how to carry hard things better.

Maybe the rainbow is being believed. Being cared for. Therapy. Medication. Community. Rest. Leaving something that is hurting you. Grieving what needs to be grieved. Telling the truth. Discovering that God is still there when you stop performing strength. Maybe it is building a life that doesn’t require you to abandon yourself in order to maintain it.

Maybe the rainbow is being allowed to be human. And maybe suicide prevention starts long before the edge.

So, for the Black girls and women who considered suicide.

For the ones who never told anybody.

For the ones we lost.

And for the ones who are still here:

I see you.

Not just the part of you that keeps going. Not just the competent, accomplished, dependable version of you that everyone else gets to see. I mean the part of you that is tired. The part that is hurting. The part that may not know what it wants right now except for the pain, the pressure, or the exhaustion to stop.

I won't ask you to make that pain more comfortable for me. And I won't pretend that a few hopeful words can make something unbearably heavy suddenly feel light. But I do want you to know that your pain deserves somewhere to go.

You deserve people who can witness it without rushing you, judging you, preaching at you, or asking you to take care of their feelings about what you're going through. You deserve care that can sit with the truth of how hard this is and still see you—not as a problem to solve, but as a person worthy of tenderness, dignity, and compassion.

You have carried enough by yourself.

You deserve to be accompanied, too.

You deserve the chance to find out what life might feel like when you don’t have to carry all of it alone.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, thinking about harming yourself, or aren’t sure you can keep yourself safe, please tell someone. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You do not have to wait until you’re certain you’re suicidal to reach out. If you believe you are in immediate danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department.

This article is for education and reflection and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care.

References

Abrams, J. A., Hill, A., & Maxwell, M. (2019). Underneath the mask of the Strong Black Woman schema: Disentangling influences of strength and self-silencing on depressive symptoms among U.S. Black women. Sex Roles, 80, 517–526. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-018-0956-y

Joseph, V. A., Martínez-Alés, G., Olfson, M., Shaman, J., Gould, M. S., Gimbrone, C., & Keyes, K. M. (2023). Trends in suicide among Black women in the United States, 1999–2020. American Journal of Psychiatry, 180(12), 914–917. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.20230254

Perry, B. L., Pullen, E., & Oser, C. B. (2012). Too much of a good thing? Psychosocial resources, gendered racism, and suicidal ideation among low-SES African American women. Social Psychology Quarterly, 75(4), 334–359. https://doi.org/10.1177/0190272512455932

Shange, N. (1975). for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Shameless Hussy Press.

Smith, M. M., Sherry, S. B., Chen, S., Saklofske, D. H., Mushquash, C., Flett, G. L., & Hewitt, P. L. (2018). The perniciousness of perfectionism: A meta-analytic review of the perfectionism–suicide relationship. Journal of Personality, 86(3), 522–542. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12333