Never before in history have blacks loomed so large in the public imagination and popular culture yet been granted so little space as real people. And, by no accident, never before have they experienced higher rates of depression, homicide and suicide: Black youth in particular have watched their suicide rates explode at millennium's close, increasing 114 percent in the past 20 years.

What gives? More to the point, why isn't anybody asking what gives? If we are truly the nurturing, pro-young-people nation we claim to be, why aren't our political leaders sitting up nights wondering why black men between the ages of 20 and 24 are now killing themselves at 10 times the rate of their female counterparts?

In their new book, "Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans," veteran psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint and journalist Amy Alexander give us the painfully obvious answer to those questions: lingering racism that translates into a general political disinterest in the fortunes of black folk (except as they relate to crime and other issues that might infringe on the white population's hermetic sense of social security).

	Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., and Amy Alexander Beacon Press 157 pages Nonfiction Print story E-mail story

But Poussaint and Alexander are more interested in dissecting the complicated dynamics that underlie not just the current Negro problem but the current Negro success. The bedeviling paradox of the past several decades is that as the black middle class has exploded, so has the suicide rate (to say nothing of the homicide rate) among young black men and teens across the economic spectrum. The reluctance to examine -- or even acknowledge -- the connection between our rising prosperity and declining mental health cuts across color lines.

Poussaint and Alexander break the taboo and speak out, albeit carefully, about the possible causes of the current mental health crisis. They theorize that, among other things, the much-publicized split between the black poor and the black middle and upper class in the last generation has engendered a collective, free-floating anxiety and dispiritedness in the black community that are wearing down everybody's well-being.

The spiraling suicide rates, especially among the young, sound a warning bell we have not heard before: Blacks have historically experienced very low suicide rates, despite having endured years of far more blatant discrimination than they endure now. But the self-reliance that has long been the core of black culture and survival -- think blues, black power, gangsta rap -- may now be blacks' undoing.

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