Another Self-Help Book?

Self-help is such an enormous category in publishing, and within the category, depression is a major subcategory: an Amazon search for the term yields more than 250,000 results. Why would I want to add to the already bulging shelves? I certainly didn't set out to find a niche, but I somehow managed to.

I suffer from depression, though for years I hid it. I was so skilled at hiding my emotional pain that people in the industry—I work in entertainment PR—referred to me as the hardest working “superwoman” in show biz. Still healing (I consider myself a work in progress), I've written a book about emotional pain in the Black community. I knew there were thousands of folks out there like me, who were still in denial or, worse, didn't know that the pain they were going through had a name, let alone treatment with a high success rate.

As I began coming out of my own depression, I started seeing it in others. One of the things I saw most powerfully in other people was the shame they felt around being depressed, as if this were a personal defect they should “fix” somehow. Shame was isolating other Black people just like it was isolating me. By talking about this issue, I could help not just myself, but others.

I'm an avid reader, and the writers I'm most drawn to have compelling stories to tell. They aren't afraid to write about their own painful experiences so that others can identify with their experiences and feel less alone. There have been so many times in my life when I've been too embarrassed to talk with someone about a painful issue. Suddenly I'd come across a book and I'd connect with a character or recognize a scenario to pull me through.

I searched bookstores but could not find a book addressing depression among African-Americans the way I wanted to—without jargon or difficult to understand psychoanalytic concepts, and in a way that would name depression as an epidemic in the Black community, and understand it in a social and cultural context. I've been giving talks all over the country since 1994, and recently, audiences' responses proved to me that there was a need for a book like this.

Seven publishers were interested, but with this book, something was very different from the submission process I'd been through with my three previous nonfiction books. All the publishers said they had rarely experienced so many editorial and other staff wanting to meeting a noncelebrity author whom they hadn't even signed yet. They felt excited that I was going to break the silence on this taboo topic in the Black community in such an accessible way. I was stunned and grateful.

Even before the book came out, the way it resonated with people who'd seen it in advance kept telling me my instincts were right. Somehow, I have found a niche within a niche—in a segment of book publishing that appeared to be saturated.

Far too little work has been done on the legacy of pain and depression left by slavery, and in writing the book, I didn't have the space to address this issue in the depth needed. I hope, however, that by creating a work made up of both personal testimony and solid information, I will inspire psychologists, other social scientists and authors to do more research in this area. In so many ways, I see my book not as an end point but as a beginning. There's a niche waiting to be blown open.