Healing Out Loud: Ashley McGirt-Adair Brings ‘The Cost of Healing in Silence’ to The Pop-Up!
When licensed therapist and author Ashley McGirt-Adair pulled up to The Pop-Up! in the Black Media Matters Studio on Tuesday, she continued the conversation she’s been having with our community for years: how racism, healthcare, and silence are literally killing Black people, and what we can do about it.
McGirt-Adair took us from the early days of COVID to voting rights, AI in therapy, and fake “doctors” in media spaces. At the center of it all was her new book, The Cost of Healing in Silence, a work that sits at the intersection of personal story, public health, and racial justice.
The Cost of Healing in Silence
McGirt-Adair’s book, The Cost of Healing in Silence, tackles racial trauma in healthcare head-on. She writes through two main lenses:
1. Her family’s story: Especially the early deaths of Black relatives, including her grandmother and mother, who passed at 62 and 54 from stroke and heart disease.
2. Her work as a hospice therapist: Where she sat at the bedside of Black patients dying far too young, while their white counterparts lived well into their 90s and 100s.
On The Pop-Up!, McGirt-Adair broke down why she had to write this now:
- Too many Black people are dying preventable deaths.
- The community’s pain is often misdiagnosed, ignored, or criminalized instead of treated.
- Clinicians are trained through Eurocentric, Westernized curricula that don’t prepare them to work with Black and brown communities.
She calls the book a “call for us to heal out loud”—to speak honestly about the harms we experience in hospitals, clinics, hospice rooms, and therapy offices, and to demand care that actually sees and serves us.
The book is written both for everyday people navigating healthcare systems and trying to protect their bodies and minds, and medical and mental health professionals who need concrete, culturally responsive tools to stop reenacting harm. McGirt-Adair offers practical skills, frameworks, and language that providers can use right now, and that our community can use to advocate for ourselves.
Ashley McGirt-Adair sits in the Black Media Matters Studio on Tuesday during The Pop-Up! (Photo: Erik Kalligraphy)
From COVID to Racial Disparities: ‘They All Look Like Me’
McGirt-Adair first came onto Converge on The Morning Update Show during the height of COVID, when she was working in hospice care. On the show, she connected racism, toxic stress, and shortened lifespans in a way that hit close to home:
“My grandmother passed with a stroke at 62. My mom died from a heart attack at 54… When I look at it, they all look like me. They’re Black individuals. And so there’s something extremely wrong in our country and in our health care system,” she said on the show.
On The Pop-Up!, she expanded that lens, reminding us that:
- The first major COVID isolation site in Washington was placed not where the first case emerged (a white neighborhood), but in Kent, a diverse, heavily Black and brown community where she lived at the time.
- Community members were not protected or supported, while people with COVID were moving in and out of the facility, into nearby businesses like Denny’s.
This is exactly the kind of pattern The Cost of Healing in Silence documents: decisions made about where to put risk, whose lives are worth protecting, and whose neighborhoods are treated as disposable.
Misdiagnosed, Over-Policed, Under-Treated
McGirt-Adair talked about how Black people have historically been mislabeled and institutionalized, citing two key examples: Rube Foster, founder of the Negro Baseball Leagues, died in a mental institution, and Louise Little, Malcolm X’s mother, spent 25 years institutionalized.
Both people, McGirt-Adair pointed out, were labeled with severe mental illness after speaking out about racism and discrimination. Their legitimate responses to systemic oppression were reframed as paranoia and delusion.
McGirt-Adair tied this history to what we still see today:
- Black boys labeled with ADHD instead of educators asking what’s happening in their homes, schools, and diets.
- Black adults labeled as “non-compliant” or “aggressive” when they question providers.
- Black pain minimized or criminalized instead of treated.
Her book challenges clinicians to examine these patterns and gives them tools to do better, while giving our community language to push back and advocate for ourselves.
From left to right, The Big O, Ashley McGirt-Adair, and Tha Def Chef pose in the Black Media Matters Studio on Tuesday. (Photo: Erik Kalligraphy)
Eating, Healing, and the Central District
The conversation also connected mental health, food, and place. As the conversation touched on closures at 23rd & Jackson and the gentrification of the Central District, McGirt-Adair identified the psychic toll:
- The loss of Black-owned institutions like Leon Sullivan Health Care (formerly Branch Villa), where she once worked alongside Black doctors, nurses, and social workers.
- The grief of watching community anchors like Red Apple disappear, replaced by developments that don’t center us.
She described this as an assault on “your brain, your body, your spirit”—a theme that runs straight through The Cost of Healing in Silence.
Calling Out Harm in the Mental Health Space
McGirt-Adair didn’t shy away from the controversy around Cheyenne Bryant, a media personality who has publicly claimed a doctorate and therapist title she can’t substantiate.
McGirt-Adair’s concern wasn’t clout; it was harm. She pointed to the danger of unlicensed figures diagnosing people, especially in front of large Black audiences, and the willingness of big platforms to put “experts” in front of us without verifying credentials.
In contrast, McGirt-Adair spent time walking viewers through how to verify a provider’s license through the Department of Health and the difference between therapy, coaching, and media motivation.
Why This Book Matters Right Now
If you’ve followed McGirt-Adair work from her early days on The Morning Update Show to her founding of the Therapy Fund Foundation, you know she’s been doing this work long before the current mental health trend.
The Cost of Healing in Silence is the book that brings all of that together. It seeks to:
- Documents how racism shows up in healthcare and mental health.
- Honor the elders and ancestors whose lives were cut short or misrepresented.
- Offer culturally grounded tools for both Black folks seeking care and professionals providing it.
- Invite our community to stop suffering quietly and start demanding care worthy of our lives.
Much love to Ashley McGirt Adair for continuing to show up with the receipts, the research, and the heart, and for trusting The Pop-Up! as a space to amplify this work.
Check out Ashley McGirt-Adair’s work at ashleymcgirt.com, learn more about the Therapy Fund Foundation at therapyfundfoundation.org, and learn more about The Cost of Healing in Silence at thecostofhealing.com.
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