By Adia R. Louden
Her name is Paige Coffey.
Missing since 2019, she was found last week, murdered, dumped and abandoned in a vacant Cleveland home. Her name now joins a disturbing list of other women who have been killed in recent weeks—like Nancy Metayer, Cerina Fairfax, Ashanti Allen—and still others whose names will never reach us.
This surge of Black femicides is a public health crisis. But, as we mark Mental Health Awareness Month, we must also discuss the implications of these killings, how they are a direct line of attack to Black women’s minds and spirits, and just how urgent it is to tend to Black women’s well-being.
For centuries, Black women have been – and continue to be – this country’s help, hope, backbone, mother, mammy, magic and everything in between. But what happens to our pain when we are constantly in this gap? What happens when the superheroes everyone leans on are also the ones collapsing, dying and succumbing to patriarchal violence and suffering?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines intimate partner violence as abuse or aggression that occurs in a romantic relationship by current and/or former spouses and dating partners. It includes physical violence, sexual violence, stalking and psychological aggression. Currently, Black women experience IPV disproportionately, compared to other races/ethnicities and more than nine in ten Black women know their killers.
And this is not just a 2026 problem. In a 2016 / 2017 report, Black women still experienced greater IPV, surpassing Asian, Latinx and White women. That means the threat overshadowing the lives of Black women left behind isn’t decreasing. And neither is the capacity to hold our collective emotional pain.
The state of Black women’s mental health today as a result of these historical and recent killings deserves centering. Black femicide and IPV are forms of gendered stress, misogynoir and structural gendered racism, all likely to compound Black women’s experiences of depression, social support and anxiety.
In the aftermath of the recent spate of violence, Black women’s wholeness and stability comprise the mental and emotional math that many of us sort out every day as we live in a world that desperately yearns to keep us fractured instead of whole. It’s the threads weaving their way through our dating lives, asking if the Black men we want to love so bad are worth it. It’s the hope for a partnership and intimacy that is also tethered to safety and accountability. And above all, it’s the longing for a world that we should all wish for—one with a culture not predicated on our endless resilience in the face of brute force, online attacks and violence.
For Black men and the overarching Black community, this should serve as a moral compass and reckoning for how you unconditionally love Black women. Addressing Black femicide and its lasting impact on Black women’s mental health means addressing the conditions, content and norms that continually make us vulnerable. And tending to our psychological well-being means watering soil where safety and accountability aren’t secondary.
In practice, individually, this requires recognizing if you have your own violent propensities inherited from White supremacy and being willing enough to self-examine and decolonize those parts of your being. Within families, this means becoming aware of what you’re teaching about gender roles, conflict, healthy relationships, internalized racism and self-regulating. And as a community, this means showing up online and calling out language and actions that breed violence before it even gains traction. Raising awareness about preventing IPV in community events, gatherings and interventions is also a must, along with seeking therapy, and leaning more into Black women’s psychological worlds as opposed to extracting with anger and authority.
Further, if there’s a Black woman in your life, it means honoring her humanity and intentionally resisting a colonial need to consume her as an unwavering resource. A world must be dreamed and built where our worthiness to be saved isn’t dependent on how much or how often Black women can save you.
We must reckon with the fact that the assaults, deaths and mutilation of Black women’s bodies do not happen as a result of a “few bad seeds.” Every obituary is a reminder that Malcolm X climbed a hill we should all die on—that Black women are the most disrespected, unprotected and neglected beings.
But Black women deserve more than celebrations, flowers, caskets and more trauma; we deserve warmth and actual safety. We deserve community response and community violence interventions that intercede before funerals are happening.
We have always been saviors, often at the expense of our minds and always at the cost of our bodies. The illegal purchasing of both must cease.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.