PhD student celebrates mental wellness among the Black community in the ‘Black Joy Art Initiative’
October 20/2025
The “Black Joy Art Initiative” showcased the different ways mental wellness is maintained, acting as a counterbalance to DLSPH PhD student Mercedes Sobers’ research on Black mental health.
By Ishani Nath
An image from the Black Joy Art Initiative exhibit. Photo credit: Steve Williams Jnr.
For some, taking care of their mental wellness might look like taking a vacation, booking a spa appointment or having a session with a therapist. For DLSPH student Mercedes Sobers, who is pursuing her PhD in Epidemiology, mental wellness isn’t about a specific action, but a feeling.
“For me, mental wellness is balance,” says Sobers.
Exploring the meaning of mental wellness was at the heart of “The Black Joy Art Initiative.” The exhibit, hosted at Hart House from May 1 to July 3, 2025, was created by Sobers to celebrate the strength, joy and resilience of the Black community at U of T. The exhibit was also a needed counterbalance to her dissertation on Black mental health service use and disparities.
“There was a point where I realized that what I was researching didn’t fully align with my own experience of being Black or being part of the Black community. The data showed lower use of mental health services, but that wasn’t the whole story. I also wanted to explore how we, as a community, are fostering wellness and joy. The ways we’re promoting our health beyond formal systems” explains Sobers, whose exhibit was supported through several funds, fellowships and DLSPH Professor Dionne Gesink’s Wellness and the Architecture of Public Health Education study.
Thinking about health promotion is what first brought Sobers to DLSPH. However, while completing her Masters in Public Health in Social and Behavioural Health Sciences (Health Promotion), Sobers took an epidemiology course. That course sparked her interest in the field, leading her to ultimately return to DLSPH in 2020 to pursue a PhD in Epidemiology.
Though Sobers came back to the same faculty, a lot had changed for her personally. In the time between her master’s and PhD, she worked at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in the Office of Health Equity. As a public health researcher, she got a clearer picture of the barriers to access mental health care for equity deserving groups, including the Black community.
She also tragically lost her partner and personally experienced the stigma around mental health care, such as family members expressing stigmatizing views and a health care provider sharing misinformation about government access to mental health records.
Mercedes Sobers
Combining her personal and professional experiences, Sobers decided to focus her dissertation research on the use of mental health services and mental health outcomes among Black populations in Canada.
“We don’t have a lot of data on mental health service utilization or what outcomes look like for Black populations. We need that data in order to improve quality of care but also advocate for service and track progress over time to see how that’s changing,” says Sobers.
However, with some of the data and discussions hitting close to home, Sobers found that this work was taking a toll.
“A lot of research on racialized or marginalized populations can focus on the deficit, because we often want to improve things, and so we focus on what those communities are lacking or in need of,” says Sobers. “But even though we’re not accessing care in the same way, I know the Black community to be an extremely vibrant and joyous community as well. It’s one of the places that I feel happiest.”
The “Black Joy Art Initiative” was an effort to showcase exactly that, celebrating how the Black community at U of T fosters wellness and joy. The exhibition, created by Sobers, featured photography by artist Steve Williams Jnr, videography by BIGSIX Media and interactive installations that encouraged visitors to reflect on their own mental wellness.
An image from the Black Joy Art Initiative exhibit. Photo credit: Steve Williams Jnr.
In doing this project, Sobers worked with faculty, staff and students at U of T in settings ranging from a pile of friends on a couch to gazing out at the universe through a telescope at the U of T Astronomy Department. Despite the stigma around mental health, Sobers says doing this project showed her, “how open community is to talking about mental health and supporting this kind of work when you ask for it.”
Though the exhibit has now ended, Sobers hoped visitors felt part of the project and used the images to reflect on their own mental wellness.
“I wanted people to think about what mental wellness means to them, how they can foster it and also how they can create greater wellness in the communities that they’re a part of,” she says.