The Club Helping Women of Color Finally Talk About Depression

Elyse Fox isn’t keeping quiet about her depression anymore, and she doesn’t want other women to have to, either.

Illustration by Wenjia Tang

When Elyse Fox greets newcomers to her Sad Girls Club monthly meet-up at Inscape, a meditation space in the Flatiron district of New York, she bypasses the women’s extended hands and leans in for hugs. She’s 27 years old and wearing light grey leggings, gold hoop earrings, and a navy cotton t-shirt stitched with the words “Sad Girls Club” in primary colors and knotted at her naval. Sometimes her hair is bleached or straightened or twisted in a fat knot on the crown of her head, but today it cascades naturally over her shoulders in a mass of little curls.

Fox started Sad Girls Club in February as a fun and comfortable way for millennial women and women of color, like herself, to talk about mental illness. Her first promotional post on Instagram, where the club now has over 15,000 followers, promised “snacks, games and girl talk.” Since then, Sad Girls Club meet-ups have taken the form of a poetry slam, an art therapy project and now a meditation session. Fox w…