74% of American Indian and Alaska Natives said someone in their household has struggled with depression, anxiety, stress, and problems with sleeping, in a recent poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Only 52% of white people said the same.
COVID exacerbated long-standing stresses created by historic inequities, says Spero Manson, who is Pembina Chippewa from North Dakota and directs the University of Colorado’s Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health.
Native communities in the United States have had higher rates of infection, are 3.3 times more likely to be hospitalized, and are more than twice as likely to die from the disease than whites. And half of Native Americans in NPR’s poll said they’re facing serious financial problems.
“As we struggle to address the sudden and precipitous added stresses posed by the hour by the pandemic, it heightens that sense of pain, suffering, of helplessness and hopelessness,” says Manson. “And it’s manifesting in higher rates of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder,” he adds.
“I think the pandemic has definitely triggered this historical trauma that Native people do experience,” says Adrianne Maddux, the executive director at Denver Indian Health and Family Services, which runs a primary care clinic.
She’s witnessed higher demand for behavioral health services, including addiction treatment. “Our therapists were inundated,” says Maddux.
Read more at NPR.org.
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