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A local group is taking a whole family approach to dealing with mental health in the Latino community.

A 12-week free program has started to address the needs of children as well as their parents. The program is being held at the Clark County School District Family Support Center and is being run by Fuente De Vida which is already serving dozens of Hispanic families.

The program, Family Forward, will go over a wide variety of topics including bullying, school shootings, and the culture clash between generations that many Hispanic families face. The intent is to provide mental health services to the entire family as a preventative measure.

“Give yourself a chance, make yourself some time to come to the program. The program is great we have very good professionals that know what they’re doing,” Guadlupe Morales said.

Morales attends the sessions. There was a strong turnout for the first two sessions and the hope is that the momentum will keep up. This is a trial run of the program and if it’s successful, Fuente De Vida will be seeking grants to keep it going.

Read more at 8NewsNow.com.

“It’s so magical and so very healing. The fact that I now get to play a role in it, the significance of placing prayers on the lanterns and the process that goes through it all, it is just so beautiful,” says Bryan Talisayan, Executive Director at Mental Health Alliance of Hawaii.

Bryan Talisayan has attended the Shinnyo Lantern Floating Hawaii ceremony many times as a spectator but this year, he was invited by a friend to volunteer.

“She thought because of the work I do it would be a good match. I cried actually when she invited me because I felt extremely honored,” says Talisayan.

Talisayan is the Executive Director of Mental Health America of Hawaii who started caregiving for his dad last year with help from his brother and nephew.

“I think the greatest lesson my father taught me was the capacity to heal, help, and how important that is. We had a very unique relationship growing up. I didn’t become close to my dad until I was 21 years old. My mom had died during that year, and I was living in Seattle. I came back and hugged my dad for the first time in I can’t remember how long it had been. It was at that moment did I realized that this is a very important process for us to begin to heal our relationship,” says Talisayan.

Talisayan says the ceremony allows people to honor their lost loved ones and to embrace the grieving process.

Read more at KHON2.com.

Ruimin Cai isn’t a talkative elder. Many days, he can be found quietly watching his friends play poker at Portsmouth Square, the so-called “living room” of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

“It’s so boring staying at home,” Cai said in Chinese. “I don’t know English. I have so much time.”

As with many older immigrants who moved to this country to reunite with families, language barriers meant Cai had no choice but to give up on assimilating into “mainstream” society. The consequences can be significant: loneliness and social isolation, depression and mental illness.

Every day, dozens of monolingual seniors escape their tiny single-room occupancy (SRO) homes and gather among Portsmouth Square’s benches and tables. They play poker, laughing and talking in their native tongues. They enjoy the feeling of being connected, not neglected.

“Most of us are over 70 or even 80 years old,” Cai said. “Except for two meals a day, this is what we are doing.”

Banding together for a brief relief from isolation, Cai and his poker buddies stand out among Chinatown’s large population of seniors. As the alleged assailants in two recent mass shootings are older Asian men, advocates are now shedding light on this often ignored and vulnerable community’s mental health needs.

Rudy Kao, a retired mental health counselor focusing on Chinese American immigrants, said the stigma surrounding mental illness in the Chinese community has pushed many families away from seeking help.

“Chinese people are afraid of talking about mental health, depression, et cetera,” Gao said.

Isolation and feelings of loneliness may develop into desperation, which can lead to violent behaviors.

Read more at SFStandard.com.

Native Americans experienced the highest increase of suicide deaths in the nation from 2020-2021, according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the new report, after a two-year decline, suicide deaths in the United States increased overall by 4.79% between 2020-2021. Between 2018 and 2021, increases in age-adjusted suicide rates were highest among Native Americans at 26 percent, followed Black Americans (19.2%) and Hispanics (6.8%). The report considered age, race and ethnicity-related trends between 2018 and 2021.

Per prior Native News Online reporting, Native Americans experience higher rates of suicide compared to all other racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Suicide is the 8th-leading cause of death for American Indians and Alaska Natives across all ages. The suicide rate for Native youth is 2.5 times higher than the overall national average, making these rates the highest across all ethnic and racial groups.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), the nation’s largest suicide prevention organization, commented on the new report.

“With the data showing increases in suicide rates amongst Native American, Black, and Hispanic people, we see how structural racism and social and health inequities – among other factors – may be negatively impacting the mental health and suicide risk of historically marginalized communities,” AFSP said in a statement. “With the data showing increases in suicide rates amongst Native American, Black, and Hispanic people, we see how structural racism and social and health inequities – among other factors – may be negatively impacting the mental health and suicide risk of historically marginalized communities.”

Read more at NativeNewsOnline.net.

Ensuring robust access to mental health care has been a bipartisan priority for almost 15 years, since the 2008 enactment of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA), a landmark law that called for mental health care benefits covered by health plans to be provided at the same level as physical health care benefits, and which was strengthened on a bipartisan basis in 2020. Yet today, too many Americans still struggle to find and afford the care they need. Of the 21% of adults who had any mental illness in 2020, less than half received mental health care; fewer than one in ten with a substance use disorder received treatment. Research shows that people with private health coverage have a hard time finding a mental health provider in their health plan’s network, like these two mothers in California. They struggled to find a therapist to help their children, calling multiple therapists in their plans’ networks, only to find that these providers weren’t accepting new patients or had months long waiting lists.

Despite the repeated bipartisan efforts aimed at mental health parity, insurers too often make it difficult to access mental health treatment, causing millions of consumers to seek care out-of-network at significantly higher costs and pay out of pocket, or defer care altogether. One study shows that insured people are well more than twice as likely to be forced to go out-of-network and pay higher fees for mental health care than for physical health care. And the problem is getting worse: in recent years, the gap between usage of out-of-network care for mental health and substance use disorder benefits versus physical health benefits increased 85 percent. As a result, millions of people are paying for out of network care for mental health services they need, like this family in Michigan who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat their son’s depression and anxiety because the specialized care he needed wasn’t close to home and this mother in Rhode Island who had to submit additional paperwork to get care for her daughter when her private insurance company initially denied her treatment.

President Biden believes mental health is health. As part of his Unity Agenda, he released a comprehensive national strategy to transform how mental health is understood, accessed, treated, and integrated in and out of health care settings. That’s why, today, the President is announcing new actions that would improve and strengthen mental health parity requirements and ensure that more than 150 million Americans with private health insurance can better access mental health benefits under their insurance plan. Today’s proposed rule reinforces MHPAEA’s fundamental goal of ensuring that families have the same access to mental health and substance use benefits as they do physical health benefits. And it would make it easier to get in-network mental health care and eliminate barriers to access that keep people from getting the care they need, when they need it.

Read more at WhiteHouse.gov.

In the aftermath of COVID-19, many people are in need of mental health care, and the Jonesboro, AR Hispanic Center’s “Salud Mental para Todos” or “Mental Health for All” program seeks to offer help to the Hispanic community.

“In our country, it isn’t always easy to ask for mental help,” Gomez said, noting that help can be especially hard for some Hispanic people to get due to fear of social stigma or because they simply can’t afford it. “After COVID, there were a lot of people who needed mental health and a lot without insurance.”

Gomez said that Hispanic Center Interpreter and Community Health Navigator Gaby Suarez has done a wonderful job of letting people know about the program. Suarez said on Friday that it has taken some time for word to spread, but they are finally starting to get calls asking about the program.

“We have started receiving a lot of referrals from families and friends,” she said.

She said there are three therapists, who are from Hispanic countries as well, which lets people connect with them better because they have similar situations in their lives. Gomez added they can also refer bilingual individuals to local therapists if needed.

Suarez said that people have told her how the sessions have benefited them and of the positive impact that it has made on their lives.

Read more at JonesboroSun.com.