Mental Health Awareness in the Midst of Family Destruction

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. But for thousands of families living under the weight of false accusations, forced separation, and state-sponsored trauma, it is not just a campaign. It is survival.

While headlines often spotlight anxiety and depression in abstract terms, there is a dangerous silence around the mental health toll of child welfare intervention, especially for Black, poor, and marginalized families.

When Your Home Becomes a Battlefield

Mental health does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in courtrooms. In visitation centers. In foster homes. In the tear-stained spaces where parents once tucked their children in, before the knock on the door changed everything.

Parents under CPS scrutiny live in a constant state of fear, shame, and emotional instability. The pressure to prove their worth while grieving a living child creates a mental and spiritual fracture that few outside the system understand.

Common symptoms include:

• Nightmares
• Panic attacks
• Isolation
• Suicidal ideation
• Substance use as escape
• Emotional withdrawal from future pregnancies or parenting

This is not “parental neglect.” This is trauma caused by the very system claiming to protect children.

Children Feel It Too

Family court may claim to act in the “best interest of the child,” but ask any child removed from their parent, and you will hear a different story.

Children in care often experience:

• Depression, especially when separated from siblings
• Confusion about their removal
• Anxiety about the court process
• Guilt over “causing” the investigation
• Long-term attachment issues

The trauma does not disappear when the case closes. It stays in the mind, the body, and the heart, often for a lifetime.

Mental Health Care Cannot Begin Inside a System That Caused the Wound

Too often, DHR mandates therapy as part of a case plan. But how can healing begin when the therapist is reporting to the agency that removed your child? How can you speak freely when every word could be used against you in court?

What families need is not mandated compliance. They need trauma-informed, independent, culturally competent care. They need healing without the threat of punishment.

This Month, Let’s Tell the Truth

Mental Health Awareness Month must go beyond ribbons, hashtags, and awareness slogans.

We must talk about:

• The PTSD of losing a child to a false report
• The anxiety of supervised visits
• The depression of knowing the system profits from your pain
• The fear of walking into a courtroom that never planned to believe you

And we must demand support services that actually center those most harmed.

Call to Action

If you are a parent grieving in silence, you are not alone. If you are a child who aged out of care with invisible scars, your pain is valid. If you are a community member who has watched this system destroy families, your voice matters.

This Mental Health Awareness Month, we must do more than acknowledge mental illness. We must expose the systems causing it.

The child welfare system is not just breaking homes. It is breaking hearts, minds, and entire generations.

And the healing cannot begin until the harm is named.