DeeDee’s Cry 5th Annual Mental Health While Black Summit 2026: Still Here

DeeDee’s Cry Mental Health While Black Summit is an intentional day of truth-telling, healing, and collective responsibility, held during Black History Month to examine where we have been and where we are going. This year’s convening places a powerful spotlight on the E250 panel, Whose History, Whose Healing, as a central conversation for our time.
The E250 panel confronts the legacy of enslavement in Massachusetts and the United States and asks a harder question than commemoration alone ever could. How do we reckon with 250 years of history while addressing the emotional, psychological, and intergenerational harm that history continues to carry. This panel explores the intersections of history, trauma, mental health, and healing, centering Black voices and lived experience rather than sanitized narratives. It challenges participants to consider who benefits from the stories we elevate, whose pain has been minimized, and what accountability looks like beyond symbolism.
Surrounding the E250 conversation are panels, reflections, and community voices that address grief, resilience, youth mental health, aging, parenting, HIV and stigma, and men’s healing. Together, the summit creates space not just to talk about survival, but to demand systems, policies, and practices that support it.
This summit is for community members, advocates, clinicians, educators, policymakers, and anyone who understands that healing is inseparable from history. We are not gathering to be comfortable. We are gathering to be honest, to honor truth, and to move forward with clarity and purpose.