Daphne C. Watkins on designing health care that meets the moment

By Kelsey Keeves

What inspired you to create the YBMen Project? What unmet need did you see among young Black men that YBMen was designed to address?

I created the YBMen Project in 2014 because I kept seeing the same gap between what the research said and what young Black men actually experienced. The data showed us that Black men were underutilizing mental health services, but nobody was asking the more important question: Why would they? The services that existed weren’t designed with them in mind. The language was wrong. The settings were wrong. The assumptions about what help-seeking looks like were wrong. Young Black men weren’t avoiding help; they were avoiding systems that had never made space for them.

What I saw was a generation of young Black men who were navigating real psychological distress,such as depression, anxiety, identity confusion and racial stress, but who had nowhere to process those experiences in a way that felt safe and culturally familiar. They weren’t going to sit in a therapist’s office and open up to someone who didn’t understand their world. But they were talking to each other online. They were already in digital spaces having real conversations. So the question became: What if we met them where they already were?

You recently told the Associated Press that mental health disparities in Black communities are not accidental. What do people miss when they treat these disparities as a healthcare problem rather than a structural one?

When we continue to frame mental health disparities as a healthcare problem, we situate the problem inside the individual. In other words, we act as if the problem is that Black men just need to learn to ask for help or need better access to a therapist. And while access matters, that framing misses an important factor: that these disparities are the downstream consequences of policies, systems and historical decisions that were never designed to support Black mental health in the first place.

Why was it important to create a program specifically for young Black men, rather than a general mental health intervention?

Because universality is a myth. When we say a program is for everyone, what we usually mean is that it was designed with the dominant culture in mind, and everyone else is expected to adapt. General mental health interventions tend to center white, middle-class norms around emotional expression, help-seeking and what recovery looks like. They assume a baseline of institutional trust that many Black men simply don’t have, and for historically justified reasons.

Young Black men sit at a unique intersection. They’re navigating what it means to be young, what it means to be Black and what it means to be a man all at once, and often in environments that are hostile to at least two of those identities. The pressures they face around masculinity, the ways they’re surveilled and policed, the specific forms of racial stress they encounter — those require a specific response.

Your work connects masculinity and mental health. What ideas about manhood are most damaging to young men’s mental health, and which ideas can actually be protective?

The most damaging idea is the one that says strength means silence, that being a man means never showing vulnerability, never asking for help, never admitting you’re struggling. That’s the belief that kills. It doesn’t just prevent help-seeking; it teaches young men to interpret their own emotional pain as weakness, which compounds the suffering. When you believe that being a man means being invulnerable, every moment of vulnerability becomes a failure of manhood rather than a normal human experience.

Masculinity isn’t inherently toxic. There are dimensions of manhood that are deeply protective. What YBMen tries to do is not tear down masculinity but help young men interrogate it. We’re trying to keep the parts that serve them and release the parts that are slowly destroying them.

What does it mean for YBMen to be culturally responsive?

It means the program was built from the culture, not adapted to it. There’s a difference between taking an existing intervention and translating it into culturally appropriate language, and building something from the ground up that reflects how young Black men actually think, communicate and relate to each other. YBMen is the latter.

What makes digital spaces especially useful for reaching young Black men?

Three things. First, accessibility. Young Black men are already online. You don’t have to convince them to show up somewhere unfamiliar, take time off work, or find transportation to a clinic. The barrier to entry is almost zero.

Second, anonymity and psychological safety. One of the biggest obstacles to young Black men engaging with mental health content is the stigma. They sometimes fear being seen as weak or being judged. Digital spaces allow them to engage with content, read other people’s stories and even participate in discussions without the same level of exposure they’d face in a physical setting.

Third, and this is the one people underestimate: digital spaces allow for a different kind of peer influence. When a young Black man sees another young Black man openly discussing his mental health in a digital space, that modeling is incredibly powerful. It normalizes the conversation in a way that a PSA or a brochure never could.

What’s something about Black men’s mental health that the research community gets wrong, or doesn’t talk about enough?

The research community is still too focused on deficits. Most of the literature on Black men and mental health starts from a place of what’s broken, like high rates of depression, low rates of service utilization and poor outcomes. And while those data points are real and important, when that’s all you study, you reinforce a narrative that Black men are a problem to be solved rather than a population with strengths to be leveraged.

The other thing we get wrong is treating Black men as a monolith. There’s enormous diversity within Black men, by age, class, geography, sexuality, immigrant status and more. A 19-year-old Black man at a predominantly white university is navigating a very different set of mental health challenges than a 25-year-old Black man who’s recently incarcerated, or a 22-year-old Black man who recently immigrated from Nigeria. Our research designs need to reflect that complexity.

What are the biggest advantages and limitations of using social media for mental health education?

The biggest advantage is scale. You can reach thousands of young men with content that would have taken years and significant funding to deliver through traditional channels. You can also iterate quickly. For example, if something isn’t resonating, you can adjust in real time. And the data are rich. You can see what people engage with, what they share and what sparks conversation. That kind of feedback loop is invaluable for refining an intervention.

The limitations are real, though. You can’t control the environment. Social media platforms are designed to maximize engagement, not well-being and your carefully crafted mental health content is competing with everything else in someone’s feed. You also can’t provide crisis intervention through a social media program, so if someone is in acute distress, the platform has limits. You need robust protocols for identifying and responding to people who need more than what the program can offer.

What outcomes are you most interested in measuring?

I’m most interested in what I call the precursors to help-seeking — the beliefs and attitudes that have to shift before someone actually picks up the phone or walks into a counselor’s office. That includes mental health literacy, stigma reduction and what we call subjective norms around masculinity.

I’m also deeply interested in social connectedness. One of the most protective factors for mental health is the feeling that you belong to a community that cares about you. If YBMen can increase a young man’s sense of connection and belonging, that’s a meaningful outcome even if he never sets foot in a therapist’s office.

And increasingly, I’m looking at behavioral outcomes — not just attitudes, but actions. Did participants actually have a conversation about mental health with someone in their life? Did they share a resource? Did they check on a friend? Those micro-behaviors are the connective tissue between awareness and action and they’re where culture change actually happens.

Have there been findings that surprised you?

One thing that consistently surprises people is how eager young Black men are to talk about their mental health when you give them a space that feels safe and culturally relevant. The dominant narrative is that Black men don’t want to talk about their feelings. That’s not what we’ve found. What we’ve found is that they don’t want to talk about their feelings in spaces that weren’t built for them. Give them a space where they feel seen and respected and the floodgates open.

Another surprise has been the model’s international transferability. When we expanded to Canada and Australia, I expected significant adaptation would be needed. And while we certainly made adjustments for local context, the core of what makes YBMen work translated across borders.

If a school counselor, a primary care doctor and a university dean each read this Q&A, what’s the one thing you’d want each of them to do differently?

To the school counselor: Stop waiting for young Black men to come to you. They’re not going to walk into your office and say, “I think I’m depressed.” Go to where they already are… the gym, the cafeteria, the group chat. Build a relationship before you ever try to have a clinical conversation. And when you do talk to them, listen for what they’re not saying as much as what they are.

To the primary care doctor: Ask the question. Every young Black man who walks into your office for a sports physical or a sore throat is also carrying a mental health story. If you have two minutes, use ten seconds of it to say, “How are you really doing?” And then actually listen. You don’t have to be a therapist. You just have to be a person who notices and asks.

To the university dean: Look at your mental health infrastructure and ask yourself honestly, Who was this designed for? If the answer is a generic student population, you’re failing your Black male students. Invest in culturally specific programming. Hire Black male counselors. Create peer support networks. And stop measuring success only by how many students use the counseling center…measure it by how many students feel like they could use it if they needed to.

What would success look like 10 years from now — for YBMen, and for Black men’s mental health more broadly?

For YBMen, success ten years from now looks like a program that has moved from being a research intervention to being embedded infrastructure. I want to see YBMen facilitators trained and certified in communities across the U.S., Canada, Australia and beyond — not as a project that depends on one lab’s grant funding, but as a sustainable model that communities own and operate. That’s what’s next for the project. I’d like to build a facilitator certification and licensing model and possibly a YBMen Social Impact Leadership Initiative. The goal is to create a pipeline of leaders who can carry this work forward with fidelity and cultural authenticity, long after my direct involvement.

For Black men’s mental health more broadly, success looks like a world where a young Black man can say, “I’m struggling,” and the people around him (his family, his friends, his teachers, his coach, his doctor) know exactly how to respond. It looks like a mental health system that doesn’t require Black men to translate their experience into someone else’s language in order to receive care. It looks like policy that addresses the root causes, not just better therapy, but better schools, safer communities, fair employment and an end to the criminalization of Black boyhood.