Compromised – Surviving In Isolation: The Black Mental Health Experience
By Amaranthia Sepia
“Compromised – Surviving In Isolation: The Black Mental Health Experience” reflects on my family and me, who are all disabled and immunocompromised – my Mom is a cancer patient, my Dad is a disabled cancer survivor, and I live with various invisible disabilities. We protect and assist in each other’s care, creating our little accessible bubble as the world continues to be inaccessible. Part of a more extensive series titled “Surviving In Isolation: The Black Mental Health Experience.”
Learn more about the series “Surviving In Isolation: The Black Mental Health Experience.”
Amaranthia Sepia feels it’s critical to use her voice to facilitate representation of marginalized women. As a Buddhist Black, invisibly disabled woman with C-PTSD, panic disorder, and agoraphobia, she highlights unconventional experiences through art. Amaranthia and Mom, Claire Jones, co-founded Sista Creatives Rising (SCR), helping marginalized artists through virtual disability-accessible events such as “Art & Mind” and The Sistas Uprising Fund microgrants.
Returning to America after spending her childhood in Japan, Sepia was severely bullied. Creating works based on fond memories of Tokyo taught her the healing power of art. Since 13, she’s coordinated art events on anti-bullying advocacy, BLM, disability, and women’s mental health.
Amaranthia won the Haley Rae Martin Full Scholarship to Kimball Jenkins Art School and created an anti-bullying project, “Do You Know Who I Am?”, which toured local schools in New Hampshire but ultimately did not find support. Instead, from age 13 to 18, she graduated from an online homeschooling program called VLACS. She continued to create, renamed her anti-bullying project to “I’m Proud of Who I Am!” as a touring local library gallery show, making mental health advocacy art series such as comic-style project, “Emo Bunny: Anxiety Monster,” featuring a bunny girl with severe anxiety; “Hidden Demons of Anxiety” inspired by Japanese ogre masks and C-PTSD; and “Surviving In Isolation: The Black Mental Health Experience.”
Amaranthia was previously a resident of Socially Distant Art 2022-23, a virtual residency about disability accessibility, and the 2023-24 Northstar Black Cooperative Fellowship Cohort with her Mom, Claire. She’s won the 2024 NH Panther Black Excellence Fund Grant, Hannan Gallery’s Emerge Festival 1st Place Next Gen Award, and the 2024 New Hampshire Racial Unity Team’s Art & Poetry 1st Place Adult Prize. Now 25, she provides these groups tools for utilizing their creativity to gain confidence to make a difference in their communities.
