HIBT Lab! The Confess Project: Lorenzo Lewis

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Barbers have played a central role in the Black community throughout American history. Haircutting was one of the first jobs that Black men were allowed to hold after the Civil War, and barbershops were often a hub for organizing during the civil rights movement. More recently, barbershops also played an instrumental role administering vaccines in the wake of Covid-19.

And now, Lorenzo Lewis imagines a new role for barbers: a first line of defense in addressing mental health challenges for Black men.

This week on How I Built This Lab, Lorenzo talks with Guy about the work of his social enterprise, The Confess Project, to train thousands of barbers across the country to support the mental health of their clients. He also recounts some of the experiences that led him to this work: growing up with incarcerated parents, his own struggles with anxiety and depression, and a gang-related incident that almost changed his life forever...

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	What if the greatest tragedy of your life was just covered up?
0:12.0	I have never seen anything like that before or after.
0:15.0	This is the story of the worst marine-on-marine friendly fire in modern history.
0:20.0	A story kept from the public.
0:22.0	It's like, what did y'all have to hide?
0:24.0	Listen to NPR's embedded podcast and its latest series, taking cover.
0:31.0	Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Roz.
0:35.0	For a variety of reasons and not always understood, there's been a pretty significant increase in diagnosed rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions in the US, and even in other countries over the past decade.
0:49.0	Some of it may have to do with better systems of diagnosis, and some of it is still a mystery.
0:56.0	But what we do know is that access to mental health care here in the US is not always easy.
1:02.0	For starters, there is a shortage of providers.
1:06.0	For Black Americans, the challenge is even more acute.
1:09.0	As of 2020, only 4% of psychologists in the US were Black, which means it can be particularly hard for Black patients to find mental health providers who can relate to their experiences.
1:22.0	Lorenzo Lewis saw this crisis firsthand while working with young incarcerated boys and men in Arkansas.
1:29.0	So he decided to find a way to help Black men and boys talk about depression, anxiety, and trauma with someone they could trust.
1:37.0	And Lorenzo realized the best person for the job might just be a barber.
1:42.0	Lorenzo founded the Confest Project, which trains barbers in predominantly Black neighborhoods to become frontline therapists.
1:50.0	The project has now trained thousands of barbers across the country, and Lorenzo is getting ready to expand it even further by partnering with insurance companies.
2:00.0	For Lorenzo, this isn't just a social enterprise. It's personal.
2:05.0	He was literally born in a prison. Both of Lorenzo's parents were incarcerated at the time of his birth.
	...

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