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Mike Marjama currently has a successful career as an American baseball catcher for the Seattle Mariners, but he once struggled with an eating disorder that threatened his ability to play the sport he loves. As a teen, Marjama attended Granite Bay High School in California and later played baseball for California State University. While in high school, Marjama developed an eating disorder that eventually led to inpatient treatment. 

Today, Marjama is open about his personal experience with an eating disorder to inspire others, especially men and boys, to seek to help and support they deserve. Read more of his story in his interview with the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA):

National Eating Disorders Association: Can you tell us about your struggles with food and exercise?

Mike Marjama: From a very early age, my goal was to mirror the image of the “media norm” for a male physique. The images on Abercrombie & Fitch bags set the bar for me on how my body should look. In order to achieve that “ideal body,” I focused on two things: limiting how much I ate and working out relentlessly. Being an athlete, I saw certain foods as deterrents. I wouldn’t walk down certain aisles in the grocery store and thought of foods in terms of negatives, like how much calories or sodium specific foods had. 

By not eating much, I thought I would get rid of my fat and by working out a ton, I would get big and strong. When I didn’t see the desired results, I worked out more and ate less. This spiraled into bulimia. 

NEDA: Did you experience any specific frustrations as a male struggling with an eating disorder?

Marjama: At the time I was struggling through my darkest days, most of the recovery methods for eating disorders were geared towards women. In outpatient treatment, I was the only guy in there and had no relatable person to talk to. As a male, my biggest frustration was how to build muscle. I cared more about how I looked than the read-out from a scale. 

NEDA: What do you wish more people knew about men and food and body issues?

Marjama: In my opinion, numbers aren’t factual. There are far more men who suffer from poor body image issues than the numbers indicate. 

There is a strong link between body image among men and steroid and supplement abuse that seems to be ignored from a reporting standpoint. How many males use steroids outside of athletics to look better? At some point, many guys turn to steroids and other substances as a means to bulk up, but we still seem to focus only on steroid abuse among athletes, who are a very small percentage of the population. While many women use diets and other means to look thinner, many men use these substances to gain muscle. 

NEDA: At what point did you realize that you had a serious problem?

Marjama: I first realized that I might have a big problem when I started resorting to extreme methods of calorie restriction (bulimia primarily). But my struggles with eating disorders only got worse. I was a perfectionist and didn’t want to admit that I needed help. I remember sitting at the dinner table at Thanksgiving in my sophomore year. I didn’t put much on my dinner plate and my mom knew something was wrong. She was the one who enrolled me in counseling and finally, the inpatient program. For me, going through the inpatient/outpatient experience was an eye-opening experience on how serious my struggles had progressed.

NEDA: How do you maintain recovery with a busy and active career and lifestyle?

Marjama: The most important part of recovery is having a strong support system. That alone is not enough, though. I’ve prioritized adding positive affirmations into my routine and putting a greater focus on time management. I also prepare for each day and stay diligent with improving my coping skills, which have been crucial as well.

I try to see food in a more positive light now. In order for me to perform, I need to fuel my body. If my body doesn’t have nutrients, I can’t perform at my best. A complete and balanced diet has helped me look and feel better as well. 

NEDA: What role did baseball and athletics play in your journey, both positive and negative?

Marjama: Sports have played both negative and positive roles in journey. While no one is to blame, wrestling opened the door to extreme calorie cutting techniques I wouldn’t have otherwise known of. 

Conversely, not being able to play baseball my junior year of high school due to my eating disorders helped me understand the passion I had for the baseball. Baseball gave me a goal and ultimately played a major role in my recovery. It’s something I love, so I need to fuel my body in order to perform. I also learned that sports psychology provided me some excellent skills to cope with the disorders through means I can relate to. 

NEDA: What are you doing now to fight stigma surrounding eating disorders in men?

Marjama: This Q&A would be one. I’ve also partnered with Uninterrupted to create a documentary that tells my story in a compelling manner. I’m using my platform, however small it may be, as a megaphone to speak out. My goal to fight the stigmas around eating disorders is to tell my story loudly to anyone that will listen. If I can help bring this discussion to the forefront, perhaps more people struggling will find the support and resources I was blessed to find. I want other people, especially young people, to know that it’s okay to seek out these resources. 

NEDA: What would you like men who are struggling right now to know?

Marjama: First and foremost, men must know there is hope for them. 2) Utilize the resources available to you.  3) This issue is not exclusive to women and it’s not emasculating to get help. Most people, at some point, will struggle with body image issues and feeling like they’re not good enough. It’s okay to have these thoughts, but there are healthy and positive ways to cope with them. 

Men of all shapes and sizes and from all corners of the world suffer from and improperly cope with eating disorders. We can and must do better. 

Read more on NationalEatingDisorders.org

On the Hawaiian island of Oahu, youth homelessness begins at the age of 14 on average, according to a new study. The study showed that over half of homeless youth interviewed had a parent with substance abuse problems or a parent who had been incarcerated.

More, about 13 percent of respondents said they had engaged in “survival sex,” exchanging sexual favors in return for shelter, food, drugs, or money, and a shocking 84 percent the study’s respondents reported being unsheltered in the past year. The Street Youth Study, which obtained data through interviews with 151 individuals aged 12 to 24 on Oahu. The research was conducted by the University of Hawaii, Waikiki Health, and youth homeless advocate Hale Kipa.

“We knew it was young, but to actually get the data to affirm it, was ‘Wow, this is a real issue,'” Kent Anderson, chief high-risk services officer at Waikiki Health, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about the 14-year-old average. Hawaii is the worst state for per capita homelessness in the country, and ties with California for the second-highest percentage of unsheltered homeless youths, according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 51 of every 10,000 Hawaiians are homeless.

Oahu is the third largest Hawaiian island that houses about 70 percent of the state’s population, according to 2010 census data.

The study comes on the heels of a January announcement from Hawaiian state lawmakers to make housing and homelessness a priority in their agenda and spending in 2018. Lawmakers said they would focus on incentivizing affordable housing developers to build more units, expanding rent subsidies for low-income residents, and creating more transitional centers to start the housing process for homeless individuals, the Associated Press reported.

Hawaii’s homeless population declined in 2017 just two years after Governor David Ige declared a state of emergency in Hawaii to deal with the homelessness issue. The state’s 2017 point-in-time count, which gathered data about homeless persons living in Hawaii on a single night in January 2017, showed an overall drop in the state’s homeless population from 7,921 to 7,220 individuals.

Across the country, homelessness showed a slight increase from 2016 to 2017, according to a December report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that utilized the same single-night numbers. About one in thirty youths aged 13 to 17 nationwide reported experiencing some form of homelessness in the past 12 months, according to a November 2017 report from researchers at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall.

Read more on Newsweek.com.

Over 77,000 grants awarded to more than 11,000 recipients—a total exceeding $480 billion in FY 2017 by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—is significant. As Andrea Brandon, Deputy Assistant Secretary of HHS’ Office of Grants and Acquisition Policy and Accountability (OGAPA), explained at the conference, this makes HHS the largest grant-making agency in the U.S. and globally.

While OGAPA hosted hundreds of attendees—both federal grantors and some applicants—there were many who could not make it to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Natcher Conference Center.

Grants.gov looks back on two key themes from the conference. Over the coming weeks, they will share other updates and information about grants management and the federal grant lifecycle from the conference on their blog.

Key Themes from the HHS Grants Management Conference

Each main session of the conference, along with the 11 breakout sessions, covered a different area of federal grants. These sessions provided unique insight and information on how to better manage grants. Two themes in particular surfaced again and again:

1. Increase focus on outcomes and “return on investment.” That is, are the federal funds awarded to applicants actually accomplishing their purpose to serve and benefit the public? How efficiently are the specific grant program goals being accomplished? As explained during the conference, these are questions for both federal grant managers and the applicant organizations to address.
2. Innovate and improve both programmatically and systematically. “Because we’ve always done it that way” will not carry weight. HHS is searching for ways to reimagine and improve its federal grant programs and systems. Simpler systems and more strategic programs will better support both (1) the purpose of a grant and (2) the people doing the hard work of implementing a grant in a local community.

Yes, these are BIG questions and ideas. Everyone in the federal grants community need to take time to consider them carefully and answer them regularly.

Read more on Grants.gov.

A new study, published in Psychiatric Services, examines how law enforcement officers in Colorado, trained via a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) program, respond to individuals experiencing a mental health crisis. The study is led by Ross Baldessarini, Director of the International Consortium for Bipolar & Psychotic Disorders Research at McLean Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The researchers considered the results to demonstrate that CIT officers infrequently use physical force, involve SWAT, or cause injury to people in crisis. Officers are also more likely to transfer individuals experiencing a mental health crisis to treatment facilities than arrest them. The authors write:

“This study of Colorado’s CIT implementation showed encouraging results for diversion to treatment by trained officers handling mental health–related crisis calls, even in the presence of lethal weapons, and showed promise for the nonviolent resolution of crisis calls.”

When people diagnosed with mental disorders interact with the police, they are more likely to experience police force and get injured. Therefore, many police training programs emphasize “de-escalation and mental health literacy to increase diversion to psychiatric treatment” rather than jail, write the authors. The present study focus on a CIT program in Colorado:

“In 2002, the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice established a standardized statewide CIT program with the goals of increasing diversion to treatment and reducing unnecessary arrests, injuries, use of force, and Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) callouts by increasing officers’ knowledge of mental illness, developing verbal crisis de-escalation skills, and improving awareness of local mental health resources.”

The Colorado CIT program includes a 40-hour training delivered by mental health professionals, procedures for crisis calls, and instructions aimed at streamlining transfers to hospitals. An essential component of the CIT program is partnerships with stakeholders to develop community mental health centers, post-crisis case management, and community re-entry and case management.

The researchers designed this study to test “whether CIT-trained officers would be more likely to transfer a person experiencing a mental illness crisis to jail or to a psychiatric facility for treatment if that person shows violence potential, such as wielding a lethal weapon.”

The researchers analyzed data from 6,353 CIT Data Collection Forms, which officers are encouraged to fill out after every call that appears to involve a person experiencing a mental health crisis. The study only reviewed data for CIT calls and therefore did not provide information on whether or not the CIT program improves services received by people with diagnosed with a mental disorder.

The majority of calls (57%) involved suicide risk, with 16% of calls involving a threat of violence to others. About half of calls (51%) resulted in a person being transported to a treatment facility. Police used force in 5% of the calls and called in SWAT in less than 1% of calls. Less than 5% of calls resulted in an arrest, and less than 1% resulted in an injury caused by police.

Individuals were more than twice as likely to be transferred to a treatment facility (rather than not be transferred at all) if they had a psychiatric diagnosis or were at risk of suicide. People who threatened violence were more than three times as likely to be transported to jail (versus no transport). Individuals at risk of suicide were significantly less likely to be transported to prison.

The criminalization of mental health issues is a serious issue. An individual diagnosed with ‘serious mental illness’ is three times more likely to be in jail than a hospital. Also, police victimization has been linked to psychotic experiences. Because of this, many people try to avoid police involvement in mental health crises. Blogger Katie Tastrom, for instance, recently wrote about ways to manage a mental health crisis without calling emergency services.

Individuals experiencing mental health crises who are interacting with police deserve quality and compassionate services that do not cause harm. Therefore, more efforts to reduce stigma and fear around mental health crises and to educate emergency responders are essential.

Read more on MadInAmerica.com.

Kyung Hee Choi had worked on Wall Street for more than two decades when she decided to take an early retirement in 2002, right after the 9/11 attacks. An immigrant from South Korea, Choi believed she was living the American Dream and wanted to do something altruistic after being shaken by tragedy. “I said, ‘I’ve gotten so much help from American people, American community, and I have to give back,'” Choi said.

While volunteering, she recognized that the approaches some health care providers took — “just sitting there, just waiting for patients to arrive” — contrasted with the ones she had learned about developing customer service.

Working with what she knew best, Choi created a business model for a “Korean Medical Program,” now housed at Holy Name Medical Center in New Jersey.

The initiative hired Korean-speaking staff members, introduced Korean cuisine to the hospital’s menu, and participating doctors developed medical screening programs for diseases like cancer and diabetes.

Now in its 10th year, the program has been a success, serving upwards of 45,000, according to hospital. It has also been adapted to serve Chinese, Filipino, Indian and Japanese communities as Asian Health Services.

“With community hospitals like Holy Name Medical Center, our mission is to serve our community,” Choi said. “Our community has changed a lot. It’s inevitable that our priority has to be focusing on the fastest growing, and the largest pockets of our population.”

Asian Americans are the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center, going from 11.9 million to 20.4 million people between 2000 and 2015.

But as the community grows, it has had to deal with health needs. Research presented in 2016 by the Center for Asian Health at Temple University found that Asian Americans experience health disparities in cancer, chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, mental health, and among the elderly. Asian Americans had the highest mortality rate for liver and stomach cancer, the most preventable cancers, according to researchers.

The Asian Health Program’s efforts to address those issues don’t only include language. The program has helped register approximately 24,000 individuals for Medicaid, according to Holy Name, and when the program’s doctors found that illnesses like diabetes and breast cancer were more prevalent among patients, they began screening and treatment programs for those diseases.

Ultimately, Choi’s goal is to see her program emulated in places where there is a need for culturally sensitive healthcare. “To me, I see the need, and I see the methodology working. We want to package this so we can spread our knowledge much wider,” Choi said.

Several hospitals across the U.S. have contacted Holy Name to look at implementing similar programs.

The University of Chicago’s James Bae created one with Choi’s input that works with ethnic communities in the city. Bae used existing resources the university hospital had for its international patients and went into community spaces to inform them of the services available.

“We deal with the most complicated care, and without speaking good English, you could not navigate the system,” he said.

Ming-der Chang, who works at New York-Presbyterian Queens said that when she came to that hospital four years ago, they had some of the same services as Holy Name, but the community didn’t know they existed. “I went to get guidance and experience from Mrs. Choi about how she had been so successful in the program, and how can we use her experience to help us set up the program here,” Chang said.

Dr. Yanghee Woo, the current president of the Korean American Graduate Medical Association and a surgeon scientist doctor at City of Hope, described Choi as a beacon in the field of culturally sensitive care. “She was able to come up with a plan that is not just service, but also financially stable,” she said. But, Woo added, it’s important to note that the Asian Health Services program is not directly translatable to every state and hospital, because each area has their own needs.

Holy Name Medical Center president and CEO Michael Maron said he hopes people see their program is more than just a marketing campaign and that it’s ingrained in the culture of the hospital. “You can’t just hire a few Asians and put them in an office and say ‘I have an Asian health program.’ The entire organization, everybody has to embrace it, and support it, and understand what’s going on,” Maron said.

Since starting the initiative, Holy Name has also added Hispanic and Jewish-serving programs. Eventually, Choi and the Holy Name Medical Center team want to build a robust understanding of what culturally sensitive care looks like for its full staff.

To do so, they have developed a pilot training program that would teach every employee — from ER doctors to the parking attendants — how to provide culturally sensitive care.

The training consists of educating the staff about knowledge like red being a symbol of death in Korean culture, so one should not use red pen on their medical charts, or that a large number of immigrants from Asian countries may not be accustomed to paying for health care services that had been free in their home countries.

“Everybody has a culture,” Choi said, “the subgroups will continue, but we’re also focused on a broader program.”

Read more on NBCNews.com

As part of Black History Month, the following blog post comes from Minaa B. with Respect Your Struggle, a Mental Health America (MHA) partner.

For more than twenty years of my life I struggled with major depression and suicide ideation. Thought after thought, I was consumed with the idea of death and sadness and how to eliminate myself from the rest of the world. I grew tired of carrying my burdens, and when my back could no longer stand up straight from the weight of my pain that I carried in silence – I attempted suicide.

The cuts on my wrists were indicators that this brown girl was not okay. I hid myself. Learning how to be bold and brave about my struggles was a behavior that I was never taught. Instead, I was constantly reminded through television, music, the church and conversations, that weak-minded people don’t get far in life. The stigmas of society told me that black women didn’t complain – they pushed through. Black women didn’t get tired – they worked hard. And black people don’t struggle with depression – we pray. Then carry on.

What a detrimental and debilitating pressure to put on folks who are subjected not only to environmental trauma such as racism, discrimination, oppression and marginalization – but also to the everyday effects of simply being human.

Since when is it not okay for black people to find healing? Since when is having a mental illness a reason why I wouldn’t make it to heaven? Since when is struggling a form of weakness, when no person in this world is void of mishap and misfortunes? Since when is being imperfect a deficit, when perfection doesn’t even exist?

This tired rhetoric that people within the African-American community are weak, fragile or touched by the devil if they have a mental illness is man-made propaganda that has been used to keep people of color stuck in their debilitating circumstances, with fewer chances on thriving alongside the rest of the world. The supposition that our ancestors made through slavery – therefore we can make it through anything – is crass and insensitive, not only to the needs of people living in modern times, but also to our ancestors who fought hard for people of color to have access to fair treatment and equality – including health care.

We must remember folks like Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller who was a pioneering African-American psychiatrist w9ho made significant contributions to the study of Alzheimer’s disease. Or people like Dr. Paul Cornely whose professional work focused on the development of public health initiatives aimed at reducing healthcare disparities among the chronically underserved.

Mamie Phipps Clark was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate degree in psychology from Columbia University. Her groundbreaking research on the impact of race on child development helped end segregation, and was influential in desegregation efforts including the Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.

These people, plus many more, have paved the way for people of color to receive adequate physical and emotional health care. But the lessons they also taught us is that hurt does exists, and people should never be ashamed to talk about it or address it. Even when you think you are isolated in your problems and worries – you are never alone. Your life matters and you deserve to give yourself your best chance – despite what others say.

If you are worried that you or a loved one may be struggling with a mental health condition, there is hope. To start, consider taking a free mental health screening to assess your symptoms and find out how to seek help.

Understand that though hurt can make you feel as if you are alone – you never are. MHA began the campaign  #mentalillnessfeelslike as a way to show individuals struggling through pain and confusing symptoms that they are not alone. MHA encourages you to participate too – share your story – tell what #mentalillnessfeelslike to you.  Because there is power in sharing. And there is power in knowing that you are not alone.

Read more on MentalHealthAmerica.net