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Queer rapper Mykki Blanco released her music video “Hideaway” in honor of National Youth HIV/AIDS Day. Directed by Daisy Zhou, the video interprets the stigma faced by individuals with HIV. It shows Blanco as she takes her antiviral medication before getting ready for a show. A couple is also in the room where one partner is HIV-positive and faces abuse by the partner who is HIV-negative.

Blanco is particularly passionate about the subject because she revealed on Facebook in 2011 she was HIV-positive. “When we choose to stigmatize those living with HIV, we do a disservice to our own humanity,” Blanco says in the video’s introduction.

In an interview with W Magazine, Blanco says working on the video was “insanely synchronistic. It is really cool to create a work that has a consciousness to it—that’s not only politically relevant but relevant about a subject that people still to this day are just afraid to talk about.”

Read more and watch the video on WashingtonBlade.com.

A survey of two groups of Pacific Islanders draws comparisons between the health of two populations of Pacific Islanders residing in California, revealing they lag behind the state in several key areas of health. Led by Sela Panapasa, a scientist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, a group of researchers administered surveys to 240 Samoan and Tongan households in California. They included a companion survey for adolescents, ages 13 to 17, living in the home.

The survey found that both Samoans and Tongans had higher rates of hypertension than Californians at large, smoked at about four times the rate of Californians, were less likely to have health insurance, and used available health care services at lower rates, relying heavily on emergency room care.

The researchers found that about 61 percent of Samoans and nearly 53 percent of Tongans reported having health insurance compared to 79 percent of Californians. Both groups also tended to delay medical care—likely because the groups were underinsured. At 36 percent for Samoans and 26.5 percent for Tongans, both groups were highly likely to visit the emergency room for health care.

The report also provided a more nuanced view of high blood pressure among Pacific Islanders. Previously, research showed low rates of hypertension among Pacific Islanders—much lower than the United States as a whole, and on par with rates in California. But these lower rates among Pacific Islanders may be because of underdiagnosis rather than good health, according to Panapasa.

The gap between reported hypertension and the new findings from the survey may be caused by the practice of aggregating the health information collected across more than 20 Pacific Islanders ethnicities into a single measure, according to Panapasa. In fact, until 1997, the federal Office of Management and Budget grouped data collection such as health statistics for Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders under the same category.

“These are very distinct groups. Each has its own culture, language and unique history,” Panapasa said. “Going in with this one-size-fits-all attitude is not going to work.” Panapasa hopes the report will allow health care providers to develop more targeted approaches to help improve health behaviors among these underserved populations.

Read more on UMich.edu.

This year during the on-site NNEDLearn 2017 training in New Mexico, participants collaborated and transformed during the NNED-a-thon! The NNED-a-thon was a new opportunity for NNEDLearn 2017 participants to engage with each other in teams to solve a challenge. NNEDLearn 2017 participants were requested to browse all components of the NNED website prior to their arrival in New Mexico in preparation for the NNED-a-thon. 

The following video shows highlights from NNED-a-thon 2017. Participants collaborated to develop strategies focused on enriching the NNED and cultivated approaches focused on implementation and sustainability of best practices learned from the on-site NNEDLearn 2017 meeting!

Stay tuned to see NNED-a-thon winners showcased on the NNED homepage! Learn more about NNEDLearn 2017and NNED-a-thon.

As the outreach counselor for Battle High School in Columbia, Missouri, Dana Harris’s job is connecting students with services when they have mental and emotional troubles such as ADHD, anxiety or depression.

This used to mean hours of calling community organizations and service providers, looking for available appointments, calling in favors, trying to to get students the help they needed. “You could spend a whole day trying to get those services met,” Harris says. Today, she just has to make one call: to a case manager. That’s thanks to an innovative program, MU Bridge Program, that essentially brings comprehensive psychiatric care into the school. It got its start at Battle High in 2014 and now is available to all school-age children in Boone county.

The MU Bridge Program provides case managers who come to the school, meet with the child and their family, and a psychiatrist to perform evaluations. The case manager will also help connect the child to long-term services.

There’s a growing interest in programs that bring mental health care into schools, as schools around the country struggle to tackle the unmet mental health needs of students, says Darcy Gruttadaro, the director of advocacy at the National Association for Mental Illness. She says when kids can “walk down the hall and see a mental health professional” that removes many of the barriers to care.

Read more on STLPublicRadio.org.

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.