News

A three-year partnership between UC Santa Cruz and United Way to empower young change-makers is wrapping up this spring, with youth leaders from across Santa Cruz County preparing to distribute resource kits for local immigrants. It’s the final step in a long journey of organizing, research, and action intended to bring about positive social change.

The project is an example of youth participatory action research (YPAR), a model where professional researchers and local youth co-develop efforts to answer questions that matter to the community. In the process, youth participants learn new research and leadership skills and apply the findings of their research to address local needs.

The team decided on their research topic and methods and collected data over the course of the 2022-2023 academic year. The students chose to focus on mental health, in connection with United Way’s Jóvenes Sanos initiative, and they named their project Alzamoz la Voz, or “raising our voices”. Psychology Professor Regina Langhout, who advised students through the research development stage, said the youth had an expansive understanding of mental health.

Read more at News.UCSC.edu.

Growing up in southern Texas as a third-generation Mexican American, Gilberto Perez Jr. was familiar with some of the challenges immigrants face.

That fueled his efforts as a social worker in Indiana, where he’s worked with community mental health centers to fill the gap in services for people who need mental health help. In the early 2000s, through a community health assessment, he found that many people (86% of the respondents) felt lethargic and depressed several times a week. It also became clear that people didn’t know where to find help.

In 2007, he created the “Bienvenido” curriculum and program, initially designed around that original health assessment. Perez Jr. said the state recognized that the program – Bienvendio means “welcome” in Spanish — encouraged people to seek help at health centers.

His program first received a contract to train others across Indiana. Then in 2008, the National Network to Eliminate Behavioral Health Disparities (NNED) and the National Latino Behavioral Health Association nominated the program as one of 16 “community defined evidence projects” — efforts that use cultural and or community guides to improve the availability, quality and outcomes of behavioral health care.

Read more at MinnPost.com.

Despite facing frequent experiences with discrimination and rising fears of hate crimes and gun violence, only 24% of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander adults and 16% of Asian American adults in California say they need mental health support.

Among adults who sought mental health care, 42% of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders and 31% of Asian Americans had difficulties accessing services, citing cost, lack of insurance and not knowing their options.

To help increase the use of mental health care services among Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander and Asian American adults, a new report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and AAPI Data, based at UC Riverside, recommends using more culturally relevant outreach specified for nationalities and languages.

In their report, the researchers used a novel approach. They began with data about Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander and Asian American, mental health from the CHPR’s California Health Interview Survey, or CHIS, from 2020 through 2022. In addition, AAPI Data and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research initiated the California AANHPI Community Needs Survey — a 15-minute follow-on survey for Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans, who responded to the 2021 and 2022 CHIS.

This rigorous survey data was combined with historical community experiences as influenced by cultural factors, U.S. foreign policy and intergenerational trauma, and feedback from an intentional sample of leaders in various NHPI and Asian American communities.

The report also provides a more granular examination of mental health experiences for eight subgroups within the Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander and Asian category. Those groups were: Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, Vietnamese, other Southeast Asian (excluding Vietnamese), Filipino, South Asian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

Read more at NewsRoom.UCLA.edu.

The phrase “model minority” was first used in reference to Asian Americans during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Some pointed to Asian Americans as being successful and well-adjusted — despite their own recent history of racial oppression which included the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The phrase was meant to pose a challenge to African American activists: “Why can’t you be more like them?” And from its earliest usage, the myth of the model minority has driven a wedge among racially marginalized groups and has put undue pressure on Asian Americans, said Dr. Jaki Yi, assistant professor in the University of Washington Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences.

“Asian Americans are lauded for being academically oriented, hardworking, high achievers because of the values supposedly inherent in their culture,” she said. “These are all things that are positive on the surface but have really harmful mental health implications for Asian Americans who are faced with it.”

Read more at UWB.edu.

In recent years, much has been documented about the state of mental health among LGBTQ+ young people. From high rates of suicidal ideation to concerns over the recent wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in states across the country, now is a particularly fraught time for the mental health and well-being of queer and trans youth in the United States.

The survey offers a window into how young people’s mental health and responses to the stresses around them can affect their self-perceptions and sense of where they fit in the world. Experts say they also offer pathways for ways in which adults, guardians, and allies in these young people’s lives can best support them.

The Trevor Project found that 59% of younger individuals (those from ages 13 to 17) believed they had a high likelihood of living to age 35, compared to 73% of their older peers (18 to 24-year-olds).

Those who identified as multisexual (or bisexual, pansexual, or queer, for example) reported a likelihood of living to 35 at 63%, which was lower compared to monosexual young people (lesbian or gay people, for example) at 68%.

The survey also took a look at how these young people examined their purpose in life and how that ties directly back to their mental health.

The Trevor Project survey showed that LGBTQ+ young people self-reported low rates of “life purpose” in areas that included “feeling enough purpose in life, finding life activities worthwhile, believing their activities are important, valuing their life activities, caring about their activities, and having many reasons to live.”

Read more at Healthline.com.

Seeing the exciting things the Tribal Opioid Response program did to increase access to Narcan, Prevention Specialist, Frances Gates, and Bison Resiliency Coalition Program Director, Brandy Tenas, at Salish Kootenai College wanted to do something similar at the college. Last year, Kathy Ross, the director of the Tribal Opioid Response program under Tribal Health, met with Tenas to collaborate and discuss ways to get more Narcan out into the community.

With the belief that public access to the opioid overdose reversal medication naloxone is one way to curb overdose deaths in Lake County; Ross, Tenas, and Gates went to work identifying ideal locations to distribute naloxone, also known as Narcan, to the community and the college. Providing Narcan is a harm reduction tool and harm reduction is a nonjudgmental approach where addicts aren’t shamed for their addiction.

The Tribal Opioid Response program also purchased five weatherproof boxes to mount on poles in different places. These boxes will be placed in outdoor locations without the medication being exposed to extreme temperatures in the near future.

Read more at CharKoosta.com.