By Angela Colón-Rentas, Illustration: Angela Colón-Rentas, Mad in America, February 4, 2023
When I was 3 years young, I saw my dad hit my mom. It was the first time but not the last—one of many traumatic moments I witnessed growing up, and one of many reasons why I’ve devoted my life to healing. And helping others heal, too.
We were living in Puerto Rico, where I spent the first years of my life. I was born there in 1993 and raised from age 5 in Rochester, New York, to mostly Latin culture and traditions. One of them being: mental health equals “crazy.”
For a long time now, Puerto Ricans have had a negative association with seeking out help for their mental health. When I was growing up, older generations simply associated it with being mentally and/or emotionally unstable and in need of inpatient care. “Loco” means “crazy” in Spanish, a anyone who treated a “crazy” person was a “loquero”—kind of like what “shrink” represents in English. Therefore, anyone who visited a loquero was deemed crazy.
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