Reclaiming Care: Black Mental Health, Parenting, and Survival

Reclaiming Care: Black Mental Health, Parenting, and Survival with Nadia Mbonde

How do Black families navigate pregnancy, parenting, and mental health in systems that too often fail them? In this conversation, researcher and advocate Nadia Mbonde explores the double pandemic of COVID-19 and systemic racism, the gaps in maternal mental health care, and how community care models are reshaping what support can—and should—look like.

Together, we examine not only the systemic failures but the practical steps families and communities are taking to build futures rooted in dignity, resilience, and real care.

To read "How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic” online, please click ⁠here⁠.

About Nadia Mbonde

Nadia Naomi Mbonde is a Mad Black mother, scholar, multimedia artist, and mental health doula in Brooklyn, New York. A Ph.D. Candidate in Medical and Sociocultural Anthropology at New York University, Nadia’s research addresses how perinatal mental health disparities contribute to the ongoing Black maternal mortality and morbidity crisis in the United States. She has trained as a birth and postpartum doula and a peer support specialist facilitating support groups and regularly speaking and teaching about mental health and reproduction at academic conferences and grassroots mental health and doula organizations. As a multimedia artist, Nadia translates her lived experience with mental health challenges, including psychosis and altered states, as she journeyed through miscarriage, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum through dance, film, photography, and digital art. Through her art, activism, and scholarship, Nadia seeks to integrate Mad liberation and reproductive justice for birthing people and their families to thrive.