CHARLESTON, S.C.�In the city where Denmark Vessey planned a bloody slave insurrection for liberation, two centuries later, the Association of Black Psychologists (ABP) who held their annual convention here say they are also trying to liberate Blacks�only this time mentally.

Black psychologists from all over the country met in Charleston August 4-8, and say they are pushing on with the group�s mandate of liberating the minds of Black people from 400 years of oppression. With a new millennium on the horizon, the psychologists say they want to produce "a new Black mind."

"We recognize as African people and psychologists that we have suffered all of the psychological damages and individual damages that the rest of our people have suffered," said ABP�s outgoing president, Dr. Samella Abdullah. "We would be in total denial if we did not admit that we suffer from the impact of racism and oppression and the annihilation of spirituality. So we�re saying, we must heal ourselves and then we�ll be able to heal our people. When we as Black professional psychologists take a look at our people and the ravishes and vestiges of racism on our people, we know that we�re subject to that too.

"When we get our Ph.D. degrees we are taught to be alienated from our people and culture, and that therein results in mental illness. Thus, we�re not living a natural life," she added, noting that Blacks in America suffer from all sorts of factors that are producing mental disorder, including increasing suicides, homicides, family dissolution, rising unemployment as well as other dysfunctions.

Psychologists by profession are people trained and educated to work in the science of mental processes and behavior. They also help people confront any mental issues they may have. "Part of what we are in the Association of Black Psychologists, and what our challenge means is to do a better job at reclaiming traditional African constructs and trying to make them more relevant to the contemporary needs of the African-American community," explained Dr. Thomas Parham, assistant vice chancellor of the Counseling and Health Services Department at the University of California at Irvine. "In traditional psychology or Western psychology they concern themselves with the three dimensions of the personality, the way you think, feel and act. But we Black psychologists concern ourselves with the study of the soul and spirit to help illuminate Black minds, spirits and souls�the things that have traditionally made us African people."

Noted Black psychologist Dr. Naim Akbar said that in order for Black people to be healed three key components first have to be identified:

� Black people�s 400 years of "human destitution" due to slavery has made Blacks "humanly dysfunctional."