Mental and Social Health Commons^™

Detroit Community Violence And Mental Health Help-Seeking Behaviors Of African American Men, Rebekah D. Montgomery

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Community violence is a type of trauma commonly experienced in inner cities. Qualitative methods and hermeneutic phenomenology were used to identify connections of low use of professional mental health services by African American men in inner-city settings to chronic exposure to trauma. Sotero’s historical trauma theory was used to explain how minority men process trauma in present-day circumstances. Purposeful sampling was used to select seven African American men in Detroit, Michigan who self-reported exposure to community violence. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews and analyzed using three steps: transcribing; listening, reading, and analyzing; and coding using inductive and deductive analysis. …