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Hip-Hop Hooray: Local Man Talks Music To Improve Mental Health


When Ronald Crawford taught his first class in 2005, he put a lot of thought into his outfit. Finally settling on a pair jeans, a white tee, a fitted cap and his new pair of Timberlands, he made an impression on his students.

What may seem unorthodox to some was strategic to Crawford, a therapist who has worked with at-risk adolescents and ex-offenders in North Philadelphia.

“My clothes built a rapport with them,” he said. Crawford called the act “culturally competent.”

Crawford had been tasked with taking a group of young adults who had dropped out of high school at an early age and coaching them through the GED. Many of these young adults carried the burden that if they did not accomplish their goal, they would be kicked out of their homes.

“We were studying that language part of the test,” Crawford reminisced. “But the work was Mark Twain and Shakespeare… These guys dropped out of school in 9th grade. I am not an educator, but I understand that when people cannot grasp what they are being taught, they get bored and start acting out. “

So, instead of tackling the prose head on, Crawford posed a question, “Who’s the best rapper?”

Hip Hop Therapy

Ronald Crawford

Crawford now helps to teach one section of a class at Temple University focusing on the works from hip-hop artists like Meek Mill, Jay-Z, Naz and Run DMC. The course has two sections, an elective for university students and a class for community residents offered by Temple’s Pan-African Studies Community Education Program.

Crawford co-facilitates in the class for residents. His book, “Who’s the Best Rapper?” is required reading for student course, “Hip-Hop 101.”

“Most students are surprised when they read the book because it’s like, ‘oh this isn’t all about rap,’” Crawford chuckled.

The book tackles an effort born out of Crawford’s GED class — Hip-hop therapy, which utilizes the lyrics in rap music to open up a dialogue with those who are alienated by traditional therapies. Crawford refers to to the traditional way colloquially as “white people therapy.”

Crawford said the tactic caters to members of the hip-hop culture of all ages, particularly black and latino males, but it can be used for those of all races and genders.

“How are you doing? What does depression look like to you? Trying to keep people calm… African American people don’t talk that way, it is just not in our nature,” he said.

Hip-hop therapy is about mental health awareness, Crawford says. He takes the lyrics in music and uses them to inspire a conversation about mental health or damaging behaviors. As Crawford plainly puts it, these themes already exist within the fabric of the music.

“I could play a song with misogynist overtones and I could ask them why do you think it is cool to objectify women. When they answer, I challenge that and hopefully we can get people to start thinking about things in a different way,” he said.

For Crawford, inspiring theses lessons means staying away from the safe songs. He prefers North Philly native Meek Mill, an artist known for praising drugs or drug use in his work.

“Or there is this new guy… Future,” Crawford said. “He glamorizes using opiates a lot and unfortunately he is tricking a lot of people to try and use drugs that are synthetic opiates, which are harder to get off.”

Crawford’s book, “Who’s the Best Rapper?” published by his company Honesty Hurts in 2010, took him four years to write. Once again rebelling from traditional academic thought, the book speaks in a colloquial tone, tossing around words like “y’all” or “shit” in the introduction. And, saying “our” or “we” when referring to the issues within the black community in Philadelphia.

As a Murrel Dobbin CTE High School graduate, Crawford himself is truly a part of the “we”, meaning the North Philadelphia community. This gives him insight that he believes some counselors do not have.

“People here don’t get therapy,” he said, explaining that a segment of the inspiration behind hip-hop therapy is helping a sect of people who he says has been socialized to keep their mouths closed.

“Members of the original hip-hop culture — black and latino males  — they do not do therapy for a lot of reasons,” he said. “There is stigma associated with having a mental illness, so men in this country are socialized to never ask for help, never show feelings, never cry. A lot of African-American people have bad experiences when it’s white people trying to help them.”

But according to Crawford and most researchers, it is the members of the black community in areas like North Philly that need to start talking things out in order to survive.

Toxic Stress

A man was killed on April 23rd two blocks away from where Crawford holds his primary job as a counselor at Stop and Surrender, Inc, on Huntingdon Street. Reports from Philly.com names the victim as Guy Ellison, 36. He had been found shot to death inside of his green Pontiac Grand Prix on the 2300 block on Saturday afternoon.

Ellison’s death is not the first this area has endured and will likely not be the last.  

On the streets near Stop and Surrender, small memorials are not uncommon — teddy bears and flowers can be seen laced up on fences marking the spot where someone’s loved one perished.

According to crime data, in 2015 the city’s murder rate jumped 12 percent, reaching 277 killings, but it is more than those 277 who feel the weight of that shift.

Toxic stress syndrome, a term coined by Harvard Researchers, describes what prolonged exposure to violence, the accumulated burdens of poverty and other issues relating to substance abuse or mental illness does to the physical and emotional health of child well into their adult years.

Research has found that the the likelihood of a child experience developmental delays or health issues like heart disease, diabetes, substance abuse and depression grows when they are brought up in an adverse enivornment.

Crawford, admitting that he may have missed it, said that no new patients have entered his doors since the weekend’s murder.

“That needs to change — problems can be solved if people just start talking about their issues,” he said.

A Hip Hop Empire

Who's the Best Rapper

Crawford, already cultivating a relationship with the city, hopes to make hip-hop therapy the new normal when counseling members of the black community. On a larger level, he wants out-patient centers across the country.

The idea has legs. Crawford said that the “who’s the best rapper debate” could go on for hours.

But there is one caveat — not every counselor handles this brand of therapy correctly. Crawford said that in order to use the culture, a counselor needs to respect it.

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