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A safe haven. A country club. A place where people can be themselves: That is how patrons and shop owners describe U.S. barbershops in black neighborhoods.

“The barber-client relationship is a very special one,” Herman Muhammad, owner of Supreme Style Barbershop in Denver, told The Nation’s Health. “The guys sitting in your chair usually have done so for years. There is a sense of trust there.”

For decades, health professionals have leveraged this relationship to bring care to a hard-to-reach demographic: black men. With barbers as advocates, health workers visit shops to educate and perform screenings, usually for high blood pressure. Women’s hair salons have also been included in intervention programs.

Intervention is critical because blacks, especially black men, are less likely to get regular health checkups than whites. And high blood pressure disproportionately affects black people, who are also more likely to develop complications of stroke and heart conditions than other races and ethnicities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among men, 43% of blacks have high blood pressure, compared to 34% of whites and 28% of Hispanics.

Barbershop interventions have plenty of advocates, but evidence-based studies have lagged. That changed last year when the New England Journal of Medicine published a study showing that barbershop interventions improved the health of participants. Over 300 customers at 52 Los Angeles black barbershops took part in a randomized study. About one-third of them with high blood pressure were assigned to an intervention group that prescribed a drug therapy by a pharmacist at a shop. Over 60% of participants lowered their blood pressure to healthy levels and sustained them for a year.

Barbershops are also promoting mental wellness. Black Americans are more likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder than other races and ethnicities, according to CDC. Yet, because of social determinants, they are also less likely to receive treatment for PTSD and other mental health conditions.

Read more on TheNationsHealth.org.

In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects a partner organization to highlight once a month. Angels Recovery Inc. has been selected as the Partner of the Month for October in honor of National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Angels Recovery, Inc. provides Substance Abuse, Domestic Violence and Mental Health counseling to Latinos/as and other under-served communities in an environment that promotes respect & honor of all cultures. They provide these services so that Latinxs and other under-served communities can benefit from all that Mental and Spiritual Recovery offers in the greater Georgia area.

A few of Angels Recovery Inc. services include:

• Alcohol and Drug Education
• Treatment Groups for Addiction
• Mental Health Services
• Family Violence Intervention Program
• Anger Management Program

Learn more about Angels Recovery Inc., and their work to support Latinxs and other under-served communities.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.

African Americans and Latinxs face barriers that prevent many from seeking mental health treatment and often rely on more informal networks for support.

“The number one barrier I would say centers around the stigma of mental health,” said Dr. Patrie Williams, a clinical psychologist with the El Paso Veteran’s Affairs healthcare system. “I think it’s both historically and culturally.”

Instead of seeking professional help some African Americans and Latinxs look elsewhere for counseling. “Therapists were not always people who had degrees. Your therapist is your great grandmother or your pastor, or your best friend,” Williams said. Williams explained that people may also be “hesitant to seek therapy from someone who is a different ethnicity or gender.”

According to the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), the stigma surrounding mental illness shames those who may need treatment. Some of this shame is internal, while it also comes from the peers and family members according to NAMI.

African Americans and Hispanic Americans each use mental health services at about one-half the rate of Caucasian Americans and Asian Americans at about one-third the rate, according to NAMI. Other barriers include lack of insurance or access to mental health care. In some cases patients may not have transportation to get to therapy appointments.

Williams said many people have to ask: “Do I have the money to receive these resources?”

But Williams sees some progress. Formerly a therapist at UTEP, she noticed an increase in African American athletes and Latino students using counseling services to seek help.

“As an African American therapist there, with me being there, I saw an increase in African American, black, African descent students coming to seek services. And, when we ran the stats it showed that there was indeed an increase,” she said.

While more people may be seeking out the benefits of therapy, Williams said many still need to take the first steps to help themselves.

“You have to be comfortable enough to and acknowledge you need that and not have that shame” Williams.

Read more on BorderZine.com.

The importance of maintaining “face” in Asian cultures goes back thousands of years. In the US, where Asian Americans also grapple with a rampant high-achiever stereotype, people are suffering silently.

For 20-year-old Annie Shi, nothing was scarier than messing up during a piano lesson while her mom was sitting next to her. She could feel the anger and disapproval emanating from her. She knew that once they got into the car, her mom was going to scream at her. And yet, in front of the teacher, her mother remained calm and smiling.

This was one of Shi’s early exposures to the cultural idea of face, or mianzi in Chinese. Face is a loaded psychological concept, but at its core, it’s how a person is viewed in the eyes of others. Maintaining and keeping face is a crucial part of upholding you and your family’s honor. Losing face is a terrible thing—that’s what would have happened if Shi’s mom had yelled at her in front of the piano teacher, and what was taking place with each wrong note that Shi played.

Face isn’t new—it dates back to the 4th century B.C. in China. But its presence in modern American life is colliding with a newer construct that Asians grapple with: the model minority myth. Since the 1950s and 60s, Asian Americans have been designated as the success story for immigrants coming to the U.S. The model minority myth says that all Asians are hardworking, non-disruptive, have strong family values, and raise kids that are preternaturally intelligent, excel at classical music, and go to Ivy League schools for engineering and medicine.

Mental health is already stigmatized and a topic not broached in Asian families or amongst friends, partially because of face. That combined with the pressures to uphold the standards of the model minority can result in anxiety, depression, and suicide. Shi said she was burned out by the time they were 11 years old. “I was just completely depressed,” she said. “I’m a good example of how badly the model minority myth hurt me, because I became suicidal in middle school and no one would listen to me.”

Asian Americans don’t report as many mental health disorders, but according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), are more likely to consider and attempt suicide. Asian Americans are also three times less likely to seek out treatment compared to white people. The U.S. non-profit Mental Health America found that Asian Americans are the least likely to have a mental health diagnosis, even though 57 percent who took a mental health screening had scores that indicated they were moderately to severely depressed.

“Being a certain race doesn’t make you automatically good at things,” she said. “But people continue to perpetuate the idea that it does. It will always make parents want their kids to uphold this kind of value. It feeds itself. It makes it hard to break out of the cycle. Because it’s not just one person, it’s the entire Asian community.”

Read more on Vice.com.

In South Texas, pediatricians started sounding the alarm weeks ago as migrant shelters began filling up with younger children separated from their parents after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

The concerned pediatricians contacted Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and she flew to Texas and visited a shelter for migrant children in the Rio Grande Valley. There, she saw a young girl in tears. “She couldn’t have been more than 2 years old,” Kraft says. “Just crying and pounding and having a huge, huge temper tantrum. This child was just screaming, and nobody could help her. And we know why she was crying. She didn’t have her mother. She didn’t have her parent who could soothe her and take care of her.”

Pediatricians and immigrant advocates are warning that separating migrant children from their families can cause “toxic stress” that disrupts a child’s brain development and harms long-term health such as behavioral and mental health.

At the facility in South Texas, Kraft says, the staff told her that federal regulations prevented them from touching or holding the child to soothe her.

While shelter managers and other experts say there is no such rule, Kraft says the confusion underscores why these shelters are not the right place for young children — especially kids who have fled dangerous countries and who have just been separated from their parents. “By separating parents and children, we are doing irreparable harm to these children. The long-term concern of what we call toxic stress is that brains are not developed efficiently or effectively,” Kraft says. “And these children go on to have behavior problems, to have long-term medical problems.”

Alexia Rodriguez, the company’s vice president of immigrant children’s services, says Southwest Key’s facilities are licensed and adequately staffed. And they have worked for years with migrant children, many of them traumatized. “We love the kids. We have experienced staff to provide comfort, counseling. And help the child feel more comfortable,” she says. Rodriguez says Southwest Key is preparing for hundreds more to arrive by adding beds and hiring more staff.

Read more on NPR.org.

Compared with their white counterparts, Black men who have sex with men (MSM) have an HIV prevalence rate 16 times greater than their white counterparts, despite the fact that they get tested for the virus more frequently and are less likely to have condomless sex.

“We have known from prior studies that this paradox exists—Black young MSM engage in fewer risk behaviors but have a much higher rate of HIV diagnosis,” Brian Mustanski, a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a press release. The senior author of a new study analyzing why HIV rates are so high among Black MSM, Mustanski continued, “Our study illuminates how HIV disparities emerge from complex social and sexual networks and inequalities in access to medical care for those who are HIV positive.”

Publishing their findings in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, Mustanski and his colleagues analyzed data from RADAR, a project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse that provides information on the multiple factors that drive new cases of HIV. The new study looked at data on 1,015 MSM who lived in the Chicago area and were between 16 and 29 years old.

Of all racial groups, African-Americans reported the lowest numbers of sexual partners, got tested for HIV more frequently and were less likely to report condomless sex. Black MSM were otherwise more likely to have a detectable viral load if they were HIV positive and were more likely to report not being close with their sexual partners.

The researchers also identified how the dynamics of chains of sexual partners, known as sexual networks, as well as the high prevalence of the virus among Black MSM, apparently drive new infections in this demographic.

“Their social and sexual networks are more dense and interconnected, which from an infectious disease standpoint makes infections transmitted more efficiently through the group,” Mustanski said. “That, coupled with the higher HIV prevalence in the population, means any sexual act has a higher chance of HIV transmission.”

Read more on POZ.com.