What is 'People of Color & Mental Illness Photo Project'?

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About 9.8 million adult Americans aged 18 or older have a serious mental illness as of 2014, a statistic that represents 4.2% of U.S adults, the National Institute of Mental Health reports. Mental disorders are also present in 46.3% of 13 to 18-year-old American children, and 21.4% of 13 to 18-year-olds have a severe disorder. As diversity continues to be a widely discussed issue in society today, one woman took the initiative to help raise awareness on mental illness among people of color.

Latina feminist and mental health activist Dior Vargas started the "People of Colour and Mental Illness Photo Project" to not only raise awareness about mental health issues among people of color but also help erase the stigma around it. According to her official website where her photo project can be found, she was honored for #BlogHer15: Experts Among Us Voices of the Year for the online project.

The 28-year-old member of NAMI - NYC Metro’s Young Professionals Advisory Board and New York native told Buzzfeed, "Mental health awareness is extremely personal and important to me because I identify as a person of colour and I live with depression and anxiety. [This project] is a response to the exclusion of people of colour in the media’s representation of mental illness."

According to Latina, Vargas is also a suicide attempt survivor who has gone on to help others break the stigma of mental illness.

Vargas recalled, "When I was a kid growing up in Manhattan, I remember thinking only women cried. I had never seen a man shed tears before, so, to me, that meant that they were somehow biologically unable to weep. Later in life, when I saw my father crying one evening, I thought he was the first man in history to ever produce tear drops. That's silly, I know, but it does explain a larger issue: If you don't see something, you don't know that it exists."

According to Vargas, the objectives of the photo project are: "add racialized and nuanced representations of mental illness into history, end stigma around mental health in communities of color and spark conversations about this important intersection."

"I wanted to provide a place for people of color to own their representation – a place where their voices are amplified instead of silenced. Participants do this by snapping photos of themselves holding up signs that say they have a mental illness, list the disorder they live with or go into further detail on what it’s like to have a mental illness as a person of color," she explained.

Moving forward, Vargas hopes to create a print book with high-resolution photos and hopefully exhibit the project in bookstores and galleries.

"I want to get these photos into more spaces," she admitted. "Which will then encourage these conversations and contribute to the eradication of stigma."