When you’re black, the odds against you begin rolling before you like an uncontrolled ream of painter’s tape without enough adhesive to stick. Sometimes the naiveté of youth or absorption in pop culture deludes us, or at least extends the expiration date of the blinders of distraction. But for many of us, once you hit adolescence, your twenties or even your thirties, you realize that you've been provided with an inferior tool with which you are expected to perform yeoman's work, which will irretrievably make you color outside the lines.

Some of us make it and get through. If we get caught coloring outside the lines, it adds character. We become artists, entrepreneurs, community activists. If we stay within the lines, we're disciplined, safely placed above the fold, near the headlines. We co-opt the prevailing rules and allegedly play the game on our own terms, suit, tie, wire-rimmed glasses, private office, dedicated voice mailbox and all.

Many of us don't make it through. And the factors that make it so are all too often taboo.

When you're black and in a family, especially of the middle-class nuclear variety, you don't talk about issues like sexuality, failure, or Cousin Tessie who’s having her third out-of-wedlock child by a different man.

You don't talk about mental illness either.

We all have them. People who linger in the shadows of our families. We gloss and glaze over their plights and their undiagnosed and/or untreated mental illnesses with heavy pauses, fake smiles and obligatory praise to the Lord, who “will make it alright.” Their absences at holiday gatherings and family reunions are the stuff we keep mum about. We joke about folks who are “special” and just a little “touched".

In fact, few of us acknowledge mental illness at all. Instead we characterize such individuals “touched,” “slow,” “special,” “out there,” “wildin’ out” and the frequently used, “crazy.”

We do this dutifully, without consolation or question, until the victim is someone as close to us as the hair on our heads or the eyeballs in our skulls. It’s different when it’s a distant cousin or an uncle you don’t see often. Or someone in the headlines, like former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair.

For me, that person was my brother, two and a half years my senior.

He had graduated in the Top Ten of his senior class. He was ostensibly the golden child of my parents’ brood of three, the middle child ever in the spotlight for something grandiose and spectacular. He was the bright light, the chosen one, serendipitously in between the corporate normalcy of my older brother and the countercultural clashes of my personal bohemia.

My brother was a whiz at any academic subject. He began reading at three years old and had earned nearly as many college credits as a freshman gains during the first semester when he entered college as a National Merit Scholar.

He was resplendent, bright, beyond compare. He was going to be an attorney, a professor, a medical professional. He was going to reinvent invention.

Instead, he became a mad scientist, inoculating himself against the pains and perils of this world with drug and drink, self-medicating himself from the pathos that punctured his selfhood and plugged him up like a backed up sewer.

He languished and loafed like this for years. I knew something was wrong before my parents, blinded by denial and disbelief, could admit the same to themselves. To everyone's surprise, my brother had dropped out of college during the semester he was on tap to finish. That was the first cue to most, but only in retrospect – a quintessential Oprah Winfrey “aha” moment come too late.

Then I remembered that in high school, he had stayed home from school one day with suicidal aspirations.

After finishing college, he bounced around and struggled for independence and personal and professional mobility. Over time, he morphed from merely distressed to emotionally dismembered. He became a disjointed and unbelievable shell of an individual to me, his sister, the one with whom I shared some of my most formative childhood remembrances.

It wasn't until he was about to jump from one of the tallest bridges in the Southeastern United States that he began getting the help he needed. After being rounded up by men in uniform and taken to the state-run facility for the mentally ill, my family stopped whispering in the shadows, plainly showing the solemn, soldiering faces of those “touched” unwillingly by what my community comedically dismisses as “craziness.”

My brother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This is different from depression, which my community is quick to classify as “the blues” or just being too weak in the “white man’s world,” in general. According to Web site Bipolar.com, “One day a person with bipolar disorder may feel so depressed that they can't get out of bed. Work may seem impossible. On another day that person may feel great, full of endless energy and creativity. But other people might think that their actions are reckless and out of control. Bipolar disorder is a lifelong medical condition that can be confusing and unpredictable, but it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

Nothing to be embarrassed about.

Craziness is probably as commonplace among black folks as many of the other pathologies we either pretend don’t exist or somehow fold into our lives endearingly. Think: Nicknames, like “Crazy Antwan from down the way,” or the still-popular saying, “You so crazy,” passed down from comedian Martin Lawrence into our everyday speak. Think: Calling ourselves the “N” word without a blink, and encouraging and egging others on to do the same thing in a showing of dysfunctional camaraderie. If that's not crazy, I don't know what is.

We now let post-traumatic slave disorder roll smoothly off our enlightened tongues, so there is a beacon of hope. Think about being the descended sons and daughters of an enslaved people who were freed but offered no psychological therapy or counseling to temper the terrors that haunted them in their waking - and sleeping - lives. Craziness for black folks is like transgenerational guilt for white folks. It lies beneath the surface, palpable but seldom discussed, ashamedly present. It lurks like a sickness just ready to break into the bloodstream.

Once it does, many in my community go undiagnosed and/or untreated, left to subsist in a wild Technicolor world like a righteous acid trip or in a dreary darkness like a black-and-white television turned to snow. They line our community hospital wards and bus benches on street corners. They are criminalized since today’s sanitarium are prisons. They eke out semblances of normalcy by playing down the ghosts that haunt them in the day and the night.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The sooner we realize this, the better off we’ll be. In the words of old-school hip-hop group EPMD, “Relax your mind; let your conscience be free.”

K. Danielle Edwards is a Nashville-based writer, poet and communications professional. She is the author of Stacey Jones: Memoirs of Girl and Woman, Body & Spirit, Life and Death (2005) and is the founder and creative director of The Pen: An Exercise in the Cathartic Potential of the Creative Act, a nonprofit creative writing project designed for incarcerated and disadvantaged populations. To find out more, go here: www.kdanielleedwards.com.