As Dr. Kenyani Davis makes her rounds at the Community Health Center in Buffalo, New York, she is still trying to process it all, after a mass shooter murdered 10 members of the neighborhood she serves.

"It's a community that got affected, especially when you're talking about a hate crime," Dr. Davis said. "It was every emotion at once."

In the days that followed, her team got to work — something they have always done.

"If they needed us in a medical component, we were there," Dr. Davis said. "If they needed us as community leaders, we were there. If they needed us as friends, if they needed us just to create an open space, we were there." 

Across the city, other organizations recognized the need for mental health services, too. 

"We were in the crowd with the community in front of Tops praying, crying, just being there, an ear for them to to express themselves," said Melissa Archer, New York Project Hope program coordinator.

When it came to treatment, Archer, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, noticed people on the city's east side, made up of mostly Black residents, were hesitant to seek help.   

"People want to see people that look like them so that they don't have to explain certain things they feel," Archer said.

SEE MORE: What Buffalo, NY Is Like Two Months After Tops Mass Shooting

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, only one in three Black adults with mental illness receives treatment.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness say that's mostly due to socioeconomic challenges, stigma surrounding mental illness and mistrust of the medical industry. Black people are often victims of health care bias when those providing the treatment lack cultural awareness.  

"I think one of these things that this event has shed light on and empower people to do is to speak the truth," Dr. Davis said. "When we were there, we had people saying, 'We are angry at White people."

For community leaders in Buffalo, that meant offering more counselors with shared experiences and cultures. 

Part of the healing process means meeting people where they are, and for some mental health professionals, that meant setting up shop two minutes from where the incident took place.

The Buffalo Urban League team says the numbers have increased since moving into the neighborhood and making more Black counselors readily available, all thanks to temporary funding from FEMA through New York Project Hope.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of racial/ethnic minorities within the psychologist workforce more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing 166%. However, researchers predict that increase will still be inadequate to meet the demands of minority patients.

In the meantime, doctors there say they'll continue to stand in the gap for as long as possible.

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For those with post-traumatic stress disorder — nightmares, angry outbursts, suicidal thoughts and flashbacks are symptoms of time spent in war zones. Those symptoms give victims no peace. 

But now, the symptoms are being experienced by school age children in urban Louisiana. 

According to a study by the Institute of Women & Ethnic Studies, 60% of children in New Orleans experience PTSD. That rate is four times the national average.  

So, how did the Big Easy — a city known for fun, jazz and Mardi Gras — create an environment similar to a war zone? 

Niya Cordier and her husband, Jason Jackson, say for their family, it all began with Hurricane Katrina. 

One of the largest and most destructive storms in U.S. history, killed over 1,800 and left behind $125 billion in damage. 

"Katrina was a catastrophic event," Cordier said. "It traumatized my entire family."

She says her 10-year-old son, Will, saw things no child should experience.  

SEE MORE: Habitat For Humanity: Rebuilding New Orleans After Katrina

"My own son got to see dead bodies, people being shot, people being shoved to the ground, harmed, hurt, fighting over buses, fighting over food, fighting over the little bit that was being looted, waiting for days for someone to come and he was 10," Cordier continued. "What did they expect that would do to all of these kids?"

After Katrina came another trauma—gun violence.  

Samuel Chesterfiled is a longtime licensed professional counselor who's helped school-aged children through PTSD.

"Seeing my neighbor or the stranger murdered in my yard, I see the blood. That's traumatic," he said. 

Chesterfield says it's common for children living in urban areas like New Orleans to experience PTSD. "Natural disasters, traumatic events, abuse — and that's both physical and emotional trauma. That could be the death of a loved one, a chronic illness, that could be cancer, a traumatic event, a car wreck, violence, all of those things play a major, major role and especially when you live in an inner city," he said.

SEE MORE: How Has Our Approach To Treating PTSD Evolved?

With the support of family, Will graduated from high school and made it to college. But a decision to return home for the summer, sent his life into a tailspin. 

"He was playing ball one night …. A guy pulls out a gun and starts shooting," Cordier said. "Those few little words changed my life...'Ma, I got shot' ... The events of what happened when my son was shot was like a domino effect for us."

After the shooting, Cordier says her son turned into a completely different person. He changed his name, carried guns, and dropped out of college. 

The shooting left this family in shock. And triggered PTSD in his younger 13-year-old sister, Jayce. Newsy is not showing her face to protect her privacy. 

"I'm scared," she said. "It's like a thought [that] if I make eye contact with the wrong person and I hold it for a little too long, something bad might happen."

Jayce now refuses to go through that neighborhood of New Orleans where her big brother nearly lost his life.  

"It makes me nervous and it makes me ancy if I'm being honest," she said. "It's like, an unsettling feeling."

Summer months in New Orleans not only bring heat, but also violence.  

In 2022, New Orleans topped the list of cities with the highest increase in homicide rates, according to Wallet Hub. Mental health experts say it's due to a lack of activities, internships and jobs for teens. 

The Center for Resilience was born out of a desperate need to help children in the city. For the last eight years, executive director Elizabeth Marcell Williams has been a provider. 

"Over a period of time in the years after Hurricane Katrina, we saw a gradual shutdown of state-run programming for children and adolescents with mental health needs," she said. "Around 2012 or so, schools in the city began articulating a need and saying, 'We have kids in our building right now who are crying out for more intensive support than we are equipped to be able to provide and it's manifesting in aggressive behaviors and property destruction and, you know, children are not being able to learn.'"

They are now the city's only therapeutic day program, shining a light to help kids find their way out of darkness. The nonprofit provides counseling and enough academics to help students graduate.  

"On average, when we look at our success rate, 83% of the kids who have come through our program and gone back to their home school have been successful in that home school," Williams said.

Cordier says such a program might have helped her family. Instead, she and her husband moved to the suburbs of New Orleans for protection of their mental health, and peace. 

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Johnny Pinchback spent 27 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.

"It was hell, right here on Earth," he said. "Pure hell."

Pinchback was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 99 years in prison.

"Man, it is very hurtful, very painful," he continued. "A whole bunch of guys that were sent there for rape crimes and child molestation, that couldn't defend themselves — they were raped themselves, beat up and raped themselves, and so many of them killed themselves."

Thanks to DNA evidence and the Texas Innocence Project, Pinchback has been a free man for 11 years but says his readjustment into society has been its own challenge.

"After I got out, you know, I was lost, man," Pinchback said. "When I got out, it was a shock, man. It was a cultural shock."

Despite how tough his experience has been on his psyche, Pinchback says formal therapy didn't work for him.

"They sent a few of us to it," he said. "We were like, 'Man, we do counseling and do therapy for each other.' And that's what we did."

Chantal Fahmy is a University of Texas San Antonio professor and has spent her career studying the formerly incarcerated.

She says reentry into society is its own punishment and takes a toll mentally.

"Their education really hasn't changed all that much. So, it's not like they're attaining these jobs that they weren't able to get prior," she said. "They're ineligible for a lot of forms of public assistance, like welfare. They're alienated from mainstream life, period."

A study from the University of Chicago compares the mental toll of being wrongfully imprisoned to the anguish suffered by military veterans and torture survivors.

Researchers say common effects among the exonerated include severe PTSD, persistent personality changes, depression and complex feelings of loss.

Fahmy says the resources specifically for exonerees are very limited, but for anyone leaving prison, family support can have a positive impact.

"When you have a solid support system in both of those ways, whether it's from family or whether it's from friends, your mental health is better," she said.

Anna Vasquez spent 13 years behind bars for a crime that never happened.

She and three other women were charged with gang raping two children, and their story was featured in the documentary "Southwest of Salem."

Ultimately, their conviction was thrown out due to inaccurate scientific testimony and an admission by the accuser that her father forced her to make false allegations.

Vasquez now serves as the director of outreach for the Innocence Project of Texas and says she hopes she can be that resource for people in her position.

"I think it brings them some comfort," she said. "You know, when I speak to them, it's not coming from an attorney, or a paralegal, you know, it is somebody that has actually been there, going through what they're going through. … It's just hard to relate to somebody that has never been in prison."

As technology has advanced, exonerations have become more common.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, more than 3,000 people have been wrongly convicted and exonerated since 1989, amounting to 25,000 years lost behind bars.

"I'm still a work in progress, you know?" Vasquez said. "Actually, yesterday, it was my brother's, I guess, death anniversary. I don't know how I should say that, but it makes me mad when I think about [the fact] I only had two years with him. It's anger, frustration. Unbelievable that something like this could happen."

Those 3,000 people who have now been exonerated are also reintegrating into society while dealing with unimaginable trauma and potential mental health challenges.

"Talking about your feelings or your emotions in prison was not to be done, you know?" Vasquez said. "You hid under a cover and you cried. So, the way that I coped with it was, I was hopeful. But I will not tell you that I didn't have my bad days. And you know, I was depressed, but I always seem to pick myself up."

Pinchback says the time he spends with other people who have been wrongfully convicted is his own kind of therapy.

"I've got another friend about 10 minutes from here," he said. "He did 31 years wrongfully convicted, and sometimes we'll joke around and stuff like that about prison we'll be joking and stuff like, 'Hey man, I'm going to the commissary today. Would you bring me three soups?' … Then we'll say, 'Hey man, it is a blessing for that to be behind us.'"

Pinchback and Vasquez regularly speak to law students and tell their stories to make that story less common.

"That's my job," Pinchback said. "It's my job until I die, man, until I can't do it no more. It's my job."

Newsy’s mental health initiative “America’s Breakdown: Confronting Our Mental Health Crisis” brings you deeply personal and thoughtfully told stories on the state of mental health care in the U.S. Click here to learn more.

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