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Gun violence is a severe nationwide issue, and media outlets have been full of mass shooting coverage. In 2021, a Oxford High School shooting killed four people and injured seven others after a 15-year-old student shot several students and teachers. On May 24, 2022, 19 children from Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, were killed by one of the most fatal shootings in the state.

Although it is difficult to pinpoint whether acts of gun violence result from mental illness, survivors of such occurrences may experience mental health issues, according to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence.

Depression, anxiety, trauma, PTSD, intrusive thoughts, sleep issues, and personality changes are just a few of the mental health repercussions that can result from gun violence. Furthermore, the trauma caused by gun violence may spread across the community beyond those who were shot or wounded. Adverse mental health consequences can affect everyone, including family members, friends, neighbors, communities, first responders, and healthcare professionals.

With such high numbers of shootings and constant fear, many live with the anxiety that an unfortunate event can happen to anyone at any time.

In 2022, there were about 100 deaths and injuries from firearms daily. Jeanae M. Hopgood, a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in Pennsylvania, says exposure to violent content impacts the brain and one’s ability to discern between fiction and reality. It’s one thing to see violence happening in films and television. Still, it’s a different beast when you’re directly or indirectly, such as through news and media, seeing violence happening in everyday settings that one would ordinarily deem safe, for example, churches, malls, movie theaters, schools, or in H’s case, the subway.

She says: “Consistent exposure to violence in this way puts the body and mind in a state of anxiety and fear, which can manifest socially and somatically. In terms of mental health, anxiety disorders, avoidance of highly populated areas, avoidance of highly publicized social events, etc., are common ways mental and social health is impacted.”

Read more at HealthNews.com.

About 10 years ago, Veterans Administration hospitals started to see a rise in women scheduling mental health appointments – a trend that seemed to catch healthcare workers off guard.

“At that time, the VA really didn’t have a huge infrastructure related to women’s health,” said Jena Hedrick-Walker, the director of strategic development for Loyal Source, a veteran-friendly healthcare company. “Women would go to the VA and get asked, ‘Where is your spouse?’ and they’d say, ‘This is my appointment. I’m a veteran.’”

Hedrick-Walker’s position is the latest stop in her extensive career working with military programs and women struggling with their mental health. Thanks to the efforts of people like Hedrick-Walker, the suicide rates of women in the military have gone down. A September 2022 report from the VA showed that fewer veterans died by suicide in 2020 than in any year since 2006. Among women veterans, the age-adjusted suicide rate fell by 14.1 percent, and in 2020 had reached its lowest rate since 2013.

The decreasing numbers indicate that the VA and other veterans organizations are recognizing the challenges women veterans sometimes struggle with, said Hedrick-Walker.

“One of the things that they found definitively is the way women sort of internalize,” she said. “Women want to take on the world. They want to handle everything themselves, and then they wait until the entire world is falling down around them to ask for help. In the military, they have learned to be very independent. They have learned to deal with discrimination and sort of being alone. Then, they get out into the civilian world and they try to do the same thing.”

Hedrick-Walker referenced a study that showed differences between how men and women view situations in life when things don’t go their way, which showed that women tended to blame themselves when things went wrong while men typically placed the blame on others.

Read more at MilitaryTimes.com.

In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects a partner organization to highlight once a month. Two Feathers Native American Family Services has been selected as the Partner of the Month for November in recognition of Native American Heritage Month.

Two Feathers Native American Family Services (NAFS) is a national leader in Native mental health advancement through a blend of innovative approaches that center community building and cultural affirmation to address long-standing mental health challenges in Two Feathers’ geographically isolated and economically challenged region.

Some of the programs and services that are currently offered:

• Youth Therapy
• School Group Counseling and Drop-In Services
• Mentor, Supportive Relationships
• A.C.O.R.N Youth Wellness
• Crisis Intervention
• Referral Services
• Trainings and Outreach

Learn more about Two Feathers Native American Family Services and its mission to empower Native American youth and their families to achieve their full potential by offering culturally affirming mental health and wellness programs in Humboldt County.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.

Early in her practice as a clinical psychologist, Janie Hong noticed a troubling trend. With her patients’ permission, Hong had been tracking their progress in therapy — and saw a clear pattern. Compared to her white American patients, her Asian American patients often required much more time to benefit from treatment. While they eventually achieved the end goal of reduced distress, their paths took longer, and often included many more emotional ups and downs, Hong says.

For Hong, now a clinical psychologist at Stanford University, these observations demonstrated a clear disconnect: To those patients, “the interventions that I was prescribing felt so uncomfortable,” she says. Most of the widely used psychological approaches, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), were developed largely in North American and Western European countries. These treatments, says Hong, are grounded in Western values and often concentrate on the individual’s ability to articulate their internal experiences and on exploring and identifying their true selves. But focusing on your own thoughts and emotions is not the only way to restore mental health, she says, and it may not be the best solution for people with multicultural or minority backgrounds.

The need to address the disconnect is more acute now than ever, after the stress of the pandemic and a recent surge in hate crimes and incidents directed against Asian Americans. One 2020 survey, which included more than 550 Asian Americans, found that almost half of them reported anxiety during the pandemic, and 15 percent reported depressive symptoms. Six out of 10 reported experiencing discrimination during the pandemic, and this was associated with higher levels of anxiety, depression and stress.

Read more at KnowableMagazine.org.

Alaska is number one in the country for youth suicide, according to numbers compiled by Alaska Public Health Analytics and Providence Hospital, and Alaska Natives are at highest risk according to a recent CDC study.

That study shows Alaska Natives and American Indians suffer more depression and cases of mental illness than any other group. Alaska Natives have long dealt with generational trauma, trauma that can begin before a person is even born and can be made worse through cultural influences or long periods of exposure to difficult home situations. Experts point out that difficult family situations are not unique to Alaska Native youth.

The Farrally family says they know this all too well, as raising their daughter hasn’t been easy.

“The anxiety, depression and then just the anger that she just doesn’t know how to control or deal with,” said Sonia Farrally, when speaking about her adopted daughter, Twilla. “She has scars up and down her arm from cutting.”

Farrally has been battling her daughter’s mental illness for years. Twilla was actually her niece and she adopted the child when she was just a baby. Born to alcoholic parents, Twilla was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome.

“Body weight, height, all the things doctors look at for her growth, she was below the chart lines,” Farrally said. “She wasn’t even on the graph.”

Twilla’s odds were stacked against her from the start. As she grew, even the simplest things seemed like major obstacles.

“Try to get her to take a shower, she would go two or three weeks,” Farrally said. “Or try to get a change of clothes and she’d wear the same clothes for two to three weeks.”

Twilla’s biological family lived in the village of Crooked Creek. Farrally, half Alaska Native herself, says she turned to Native hospitals for help with Twilla, but had little luck.

Read more at AlaskaNewsSource.com.