July is the Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month.

The month honors Campbell, an advocate and author who co-founded the National Alliance on Mental Illness Urban Los Angeles to help people from marginalized backgrounds seek mental health services.

Gail Wyatt, a clinical psychologist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, sat down with Daily Bruin contributor Donya Hassanshahi to discuss the importance of addressing mental health in minority communities.

Wyatt, a sex therapist and professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, was the first African American licensed to practice psychology in California. She said she has worked in her field for 52 years and has been a UCLA professor since 1974.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DB: Why is it significant to recognize marginalized groups and their mental well-being?

GW: This is a very diverse world, and this is a very diverse country. Our country is founded on the backs of so many indigenous people who were here long before anybody else. And yet, there are so many people who want to tell the story as if people of color don’t exist when they have been the basis of the development and the maintenance and sustenance during hard times. So, it’s distressing to see people try to rewrite history.

DB: In relation to your research, what should people know about mental health and the work that is being done to treat patients?

GW: Mental health has not always been available to everyone, even when we knew what to do and what to call a variety of symptoms. We’ve known that something was happening to people’s brains. We haven’t always known why it happened. We haven’t always understood that some of these mental health illnesses pass down from generation to generation.

We’ve had a lot of confusion about mental health – but as we’ve known more, we’ve been able to educate the public that could trust, could listen, and wanted to listen and do more about their mental health.

DB: As the first African American licensed to practice psychology in California, what advances have you observed in mental health knowledge and practices throughout your career?

GW: When I was licensed, everybody had to go back over that question and ask me again because they couldn’t believe that I actually passed the test to be a licensed clinical psychologist.

Some people, because they don’t see it today, it’s not as obvious. They don’t think that there’s ever been an issue around it, but there was. Somebody’s got to get in that system, learn it and then share it. Whatever I learned, I shared it. I was fortunate enough to be at UCLA and to meet psychologists who had passed the tests, who were licensed, and they knew that I could not be hired professionally unless I was licensed, too.

DB: How do you advise college students to take initiative by advocating for and taking care of their mental health?

GW: It’s a lifestyle, isn’t it? It’s something you have to learn to do everyday, is to take care of your body, yourself.

UCLA is constantly developing programs for the undergrads on what they can do if they have difficulties. You really have to be actively involved in who you are and how you can stay healthy.