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The COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement have raised consciousness about the country’s persistent health inequities, but one group is often overlooked in efforts to reduce these disparities: American Indian and Alaska Native people. Data reveal troubling realities about the long-standing and escalating mental health conditions affecting the 3.7 million people in this population.

Alcohol-induced deaths were highest among American Indian and Alaska Native people at 172 per 100,000, followed by Latinx people at 26.6, Whites at 25.8, and Blacks at 18.4, according to national data from 2016. These deaths could be caused by alcoholic liver disease, mental and behavioral disorders due to alcohol use, degeneration of the nervous system, or other conditions related to alcohol consumption (Spillane, S. et al., JAMA Network Open, Vol. 3. No. 2, 2020). The largest escalations in suicide rates from 1999 to 2017 occurred in American Indian and Alaska Native women and men, with increases of 139% and 71%, respectively. By comparison, the increases for White women and men were 68% and 40%, and even less for other racial and ethnic groups (Curtin, S. C., & Hedegaard, H., Health E-Stats, 2019).

COVID-19 also disproportionately affected tribal communities. They experienced the largest drop in life expectancy of any racial and ethnic group in the United States during the pandemic.

Although these health disparities may seem intractable, Native American psychologists suggest that progress has been slow in part because the mental health profession needs to embrace a new paradigm to better serve American Indian and Alaska Native people. “The traditional understanding of mental health issues and the models for treating them are still rooted in a Western perspective,” said Art Blume, PhD, a clinical psychology professor at Washington State University who is Cherokee and Choctaw. “In psychology, we focus on treating the individual and promoting autonomy as a marker for health and well-being, but this is not necessarily the worldview of Indigenous people.” Traditionally, many tribes have viewed the world as an interdependent system in which the cosmos, the natural environment, and the community are connected to wellness, Blume added.

Rather than adapting empirically validated treatments from mainstream psychology, Blume is among a cadre of psychologists who are calling for the development of innovative treatment approaches based on American Indian and Alaska Native values and worldviews. As a start, practitioners and researchers must embrace cultural humility and a willingness to learn how the history of subjugation, oppression, and dispossession has affected tribal communities, said Harvard University’s Joseph Gone, PhD, a professor of anthropology and of global health and social medicine who is also past-president of the Society of Indian Psychologists. “Our way of life was considered hopelessly backwards and savage, and we were expected to become farmers and ranchers and learn reading, writing, and arithmetic,” said Gone, who is a member of the Aaniiih-Gros Ventre Tribal Nation of Montana. “The deep damage from the loss of identity contributed to postcolonial disorders such as suicide, trauma, and addiction.”

Read more at APA.org.

Every day, Andre Rush, a retired Army officer and former White House chef, does 2,222 pushups. And every day, he thinks about what that number symbolizes: a tribute to the military veterans who die daily from suicide.

Rush’s ritual is more than just a tribute, however.

“It’s a reminder to never become complacent, that we still have work to do and we still have to keep going,” Rush told ABC News. “And you can’t stop. You can never give up on something that you believe in, especially people.”

The prominent chef, TV host and advocate recently joined “Face the Fight,” a multimillion-dollar new initiative launched last month to halve the suicide rate among veterans by 2030.

Established by USAA — a financial company for military members, veterans and their families — and an initial $41 million in philanthropic grants, the “Face the Fight” campaign is designed to raise awareness and support for veteran suicide prevention.

A coalition of corporations, foundations, nonprofits and veteran-focused organizations are involved, such as the Humana Foundation and Reach Resilience, an Endeavors Foundation.

Katy Dondanville, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has spent her career researching PTSD and suicide in veterans. She said the reasons why someone dies by suicide are complicated.

“What we know is that there is not one cause of suicide. It’s a complex interplay of risk factors and protective factors that impact every individual differently,” said Dondanville, whose program is getting money from “Face the Fight.”

Read more at ABCNews.com.

Ellisa Edeyaoch shared her struggles with pain, fatigue, illness, social isolation and mental health during her pregnancy were all worth it when she saw her newborn son, Elijah, for the first time. “No matter how hard it was for me and how unprepared I was, at that moment, in that split second, I remembered all of the good times I had while I was pregnant.”

Edeyaoch, a senior studying Pacific Island Studies from Micronesia, said she wished she had known more about the trials of being pregnant before her own experience after giving birth to Elijah in September 2022.

“The first trimester was one of the hardest months with school and with my mental health. … I was kind of overwhelmed,” she said. While working at the Joseph F. Smith Library, she said her employers were very understanding of her health condition, allowing her to have days off. However, she said she felt guilty for taking so many days off, especially from school.

Edeyaoch’s husband and Elijah’s father, Kaytano Edeyaoch, a BYUH alumnus who studied communications and is currently working at the Banyan Dining Hall full-time, said, “I am sure about 80 percent of our co-workers had no idea what was going on.”

He shared he had several pregnant classmates and saw them missing classes, but he said he did not know what they were going through until he saw his wife going through her pregnancy. She had days when she couldn’t even get out of bed, said Kaytano Edeyaoch.

Ellisa Edeyaoch said she felt lonely during her pregnancy but thought it was just a pregnancy hormone. Since the culture where she grew up does not consider mental health to be a real issue, asking for help was embarrassing to her, she said.

“I remember feeling very alone, but at the same time, I was too shy to reach out for help,” she added. Because she felt ashamed to have those feelings, she said she kept them to herself until she noticed it was affecting her schooling and work.

Read more at KeAlakai.BYUH.edu.

Latino adults in the United States with documentation status concerns—such as fearing deportation—report poorer physical and mental health than individuals without those concerns, according to a new University of Michigan study.

Regardless of their documentation status distresses, Latino participants who feel a stronger sense of support report fewer negative mental health symptoms, the research shows.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, there are about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., with the majority being of Latino descent. Despite the large size of this population, access to resources supporting mental and physical health is relatively low due to social, systemic, and linguistic barriers.

The awareness of potential discrimination from government officials, health care professionals and everyday encounters discourages undocumented individuals from seeking care, says Fernanda Lima Cross, an assistant professor at the U-M School of Social Work, and colleagues, who talked to nearly 500 Latino adults in Washtenaw County, Michigan, in 2013-14.

“The goal of this data collection was to provide a snapshot of the health and mental health of the Latinx population of the county to increase awareness of the community’s needs and strengths, which can support program and intervention development as well as provide information to agencies and clinicians working with the community,” Cross said.

Even though the data is from a decade ago, the results are still applicable today, Cross says. When the data was collected, Latino immigrants in Washtenaw County lived in hypervigilance due to community raids under the Obama administration. Since then, Latino immigrants continued to experience marginalization and discrimination throughout the Trump administration, she says.

Read more at News.UMich.edu.

Based in Kent, Project Feast is a nonprofit that provides refugees and immigrants with hands-on vocational training to gain a footing in Washington’s commercial food industry.

One of the many moving aspects of this story was watching Van Nguyen, Project Feast’s executive director, come full circle as she reflected on her own family’s escape from postwar Vietnam. She is too young to remember the details of her first days in America, but the volume of refugees needing help has been at times overwhelming.

Project Feast usually hosts multicultural groups, allowing apprentices to work alongside refugees and immigrants from different backgrounds and languages to further enrich the experience. An Afghan-only cohort of apprentices faced unique challenges, particularly their fairly recent shared trauma. Language barriers made training take longer than usual. Stress at home sometimes transferred into the classroom. For some, food triggered memories of home and forced separation from their loved ones. Nguyen and her fellow teachers established solutions on the fly, including a time-out space for students to take a mental health break to recover from emotion.

Read more at Crosscut.com.

SAMHSA’s mission is to lead public health and service delivery efforts that promote mental health, prevent substance misuse, and provide treatments and supports to foster recovery while ensuring equitable access and better outcomes. The Division of Grant Review is recruiting reviewers who have academic qualifications and professional work experience in mental health services, preventing substance misuse, and/or treating substance use disorder.

Lear more and apply!