“They said: ‘That’s going to make you crazy. You’ve just got to pray and have faith,’ ” recalled Dyson, who is African American and the daughter of a Baptist minister. “They said, ‘That’s the way of the white man, poisoning you.’ ”
Four years later, Dyson was a student at the University of Texas at Austin and still battling debilitating depression. A friend, who was biracial, urged her to seek counseling.
“I said, ‘Girl, we don’t do that . . . that’s your white side,’ ” said Dyson, now 31. But she eventually agreed to meet with the university’s only black counselor. Her treatment was so transformative that she now splits her time working as a senior manager at the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Arlington and as a life coach and motivational speaker on mental health and other issues in Houston.
