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The study from the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness ties homelessness and health to school performance. For example, in districts with more homeless kids than average, about one-third of third graders can read proficiently. In districts with a below-average homeless rate, more kids can read – almost half of those measured.

Jeanne Stamp is the project director for the Texas Homeless Education Office in Austin. While her department focuses on academics, she works with health agencies because she agrees with the new study: Performance suffers when health does. “For us, those issues come into play because, obviously, children that have those issues that go untreated without access to care aren’t very likely to be attending school very regularly or being successful in school,” Stamp says.

The report cites 2014 data — the latest available — showing 111,000 homeless students in Texas. Dallas has more than 3,000 of them — one of five Texas cities with that many. Federal funding, which can cover some student health needs, fell that year even as the homeless population rose.

“Many of the school districts have health advisory committees that they address these kind of issues for highly mobile kids, kids in poverty, kids who are economically disadvantaged and have some of these issues without proper access to either health or mental health care,” Stamp says.

The report says homeless high school students have worse health outcomes than others, disproportionately face the most extreme health risks, and are also more likely to take advantage of school-based clinics.

Read more on KERANews.org.

Studies have shown that disabled and deaf people are more likely to experience common mental health problems, especially anxiety and depression. Around one in three people with chronic physical impairment experience a mental health problem, compared to one in four in the wider population.

Deaf people are twice as likely to suffer from depression as hearing people, and around 40 per cent of people who lose their sight develop depression.

The links between physical and sensory impairment and mental health are complex. But depression and anxiety are not the inevitable consequences of being, or becoming, a disabled person. Disability rights campaigners have raised concerns that many, including some health professionals, believe that depression and physical/sensory impairment go together unavoidably, especially when the impairment is acquired later in life. This has led to a lack of focus on the mental health needs of disabled and Deaf people and on the prevention of avoidable mental health problems.

Eight out of 10 people with a physical impairment were not born with it. The vast majority become impaired through injury, accident, or illnesses such as stroke. The prevalence of disability therefore rises with age. This means that mental health services need to know how to support people who become disabled later in life, as well as those who are born with impairments.

Read more on HippocraticPost.com.

The State of Oklahoma, in partnership with Tulsa-based Family & Children’s Services, has announced a pay-for-success (PFS) contract with Women in Recovery aimed at reducing the female incarceration rate in the state, the highest in the nation.

Established in 2009, Women in Recovery is an intensive outpatient alternative for women facing long-term prison sentences for drug-related offenses. The program works closely with the criminal justice system and multiple community partners to ensure that program participants receive supervision, substance abuse and mental health treatment, workforce readiness training, and assistance with parent-child reunification, equipping them with the skills they need to become productive members of society. The PFS contract with the state will enable WIR to expand its services to up to a hundred and twenty-five women annually for up to five years.

According to the  agreement, the state will require Family & Children’s Services to secure at least $2 million in capital to fund the WIR program each year of the five-year term of the agreement before the contract can be renewed. To reduce the financial risk for the state and assure the continued financial solvency of WIR, the George Kaiser Family Foundation will continue to provide $1.8 million a year to organizations working to address the high rate of female incarceration in Tulsa County, including WIR. The funding from the foundation allows for payments from the state to be re-invested directly into a program as milestones are achieved.

Because payments are only made when program outcomes are achieved, the pay-for-success model transfers risk from taxpayers to the private sector, allowing a state like Oklahoma to pursue promising interventions while realizing long-term cost savings.

Read more on PhilanthropyNewsDigest.org.

Every year, more than 40 million Americans struggle with mental illness. African American men are as likely as anyone else to have mental illness, but they are less likely to get help. Depression and other mental illness can be deadly if left untreated. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among African Americans 15 to 24 years old. Untreated mental illness can also make African American men more vulnerable to substance abuse, homelessness, incarceration, and homicide.

To help start conversations about mental health, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) have launched Brother, You’re on My Mind: Changing the National Dialogue Regarding Mental Health Among African American Men. This initiative has two major goals:

• Goal 1: To collaborate on efforts to educate Omega members, their families, and related communities on the effects of depression and stress.
• Goal 2: To communicate the importance of seeking help for mental health problems and to encourage affected individuals to get information from their health care providers and others in order to obtain appropriate treatment.

This initiative uses a variety of activities to raise awareness of the mental health challenges associated with depression and stress that affect African American men and their families.

The Brother, You’re on My Mind toolkit provides Omega Psi Phi Fraternity chapters with the materials needed to educate fellow fraternity brothers and community members on depression and stress in African American men. Omega chapters and their partners will use the toolkit to help plan and execute community education events and build strategic community partnerships to advance initiative goals. Other organizations, such as nonprofits, churches, youth groups, and retirement homes, are invited to use toolkit materials as desired to educate African American families on mental health.

Read more on NIMHD.gov. View and download the toolkit.

A new study has found that high-income communities are more likely to have access to specialty mental health treatment resources, including office-based practices, than low-income areas. Researchers indicated that outpatient mental health treatment facilities, which were more commonly found in low-income communities, can provide an avenue to reduce disparities in access to care.  

Published in JAMA Psychiatry, the research analyzed the geographic concentration of specialty mental health treatment resources by zip code tabulation areas separated into quartiles of median household income. The authors explained that previous studies have focused on mental health treatment availability within US counties, which are larger and much more heterogeneous in nature than communities. Communities are a more relevant level of analysis as low-income patients may have difficulties securing transportation to access more distant resources located in the same county.

Using data from the online Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator provided by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the researchers identified 7770 outpatient facilities that provided specialty mental health treatment. They then collected data from the Zip Code Business Patterns database to identify 11,165 mental health specialty practices operated by physicians like psychiatrists and 20,290 practices operated by non-physician professionals. Finally, the data were merged with sociodemographic metrics for almost 32,000 communities broken down by median income quartile and metropolitan, suburban, or rural area.    

The researchers found some notable disparities in the distribution of mental health facilities. Over 4 in 10 communities in the highest income quartile had any type of specialty mental health treatment location, compared with less than a quarter of those in the lowest quartile. Specifically, the wealthier areas were significantly more likely to contain office-based practices of both physicians and non-physicians, even after adjusting for covariates like community size and age, race, and sex distribution among residents.  

However, the communities in the lowest income quartile were more likely to have outpatient mental health treatment facilities than those in the highest quartile (16.5% vs 12.9%). Of the lowest-income areas that could access at least 1 mental health resource, over 70% had an outpatient mental health facility.

Read more AJMC.com.

Everyone involved in the mission to end HIV/AIDS wants to get as many people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) into care as possible. Yet stigma remains a key barrier to achieving that goal. The Black AIDS Institute and the Positive Women’s Network (PWN) USA held a Brown Bag Lunch Webinar in March 2017 to help change that.

The webinar, “Combating Stigma,” looked at the role of stigma in the context of HIV and shared tactics to reduce it. The session was led by Vanessa Johnson, director of national training and leadership development for PWN-USA, and Erica Lillquist, mobilization manager for the Institute.

Before one can look at stigma in terms of HIV, it’s important to get an understanding of the concept in general, Lillquist said. Stigma is a social process in which certain people are perceived to be less valuable than others based on a set of characteristics they possess. HIV-related stigma refers to adverse beliefs people have about PLWHA. Much of the stigma surrounding HIV stems from a lack of knowledge about HIV. For example, some mistakenly believe that HIV is a death sentence. Others wrongly believe that HIV is the result of personal irresponsibility, or is transmitted only through sex, according to Johnson.

Not only is stigma hurtful, but it also has dire consequences. Those who are stigmatized could experience loss of income and livelihood because of discrimination. Others could face the loss of relationships. Stigma can also cause PLWHA to drop out of care or avoid getting the care they need in the first place. In fact, the World Health Organization found that fear of stigma is one of the main reasons people avoid getting tested and getting on treatment.

Read more to learn how you can reduce the effects of stigma on BlackAIDS.org.