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HY's Fresh Air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful

conversation. This is Fresh Air.

I'm Tanya Mosley.

Actor Courtney B. Vance's decades-long career spans across stage, film, and television.

But when he was a young actor in the 90s on Broadway, he received a call from his mother that would tear his world apart.

His father was dead, she said, by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Years later, Vance's Godson, a young promising college student,

would succumb to the same fate. What transpired for Vance after these devastating losses

has now become a lifetime of peeling back the layers of not only

his father's pain but his own struggles too as a black man in America.

In a new book, The Invisible Aake, Courtney B Vance and psychologist Dr Robin Smith explore the trauma unique to black men and boys,

and what they say is an urgent need to change the conversation about mental health.

In the decades since Vance's father died, change the conversation about mental health.

In the decades since Vance's father died,

rates of suicide and depression among black men and boys

have steadily risen to alarming rates.

Courtney B Vance is an award-winningwinning actor known for his roles in the

hunt for Red October, the preacher's wife, FX's The People versus O.J. Simpson,

and HBO's Lovecraft's Lovecraft country.

Dr Robin L. Smith is a licensed psychologist,

New York Times best-selling author,

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