News

The American Psychiatric Association reports that of the 41,000 psychiatrists in this country, African Americans make up only 2% of that population. In addition, only 4% of psychologists are African American. With such low numbers, African Americans seeking mental health therapy are having trouble getting matched up with providers who look like them.

Cherish Harris is a grad student clinician in the psychology department at Eastern Kentucky University. She says the number of Black patients seeking mental health far outweighs the number of Black mental health providers. EKU’s psychology department has 58 students. Three of them are African American, two women and one man.

When Harris graduates, she wants to go back home to Louisville and help the underserved population.

“Being able to have somebody that looks like you, I think that’s immediately a reassurance that I’m with somebody that looks like me, knows what it’s like, and also have the care and concern in that regard,” Harris said.

Dr. Theresa Botts is the director of the EKU Psychology Clinic. She says throughout history, the field has had a negative stigma within the African American community.

“We have a somewhat slight increase in the number of folks seeking degrees in clinical and counseling psychology,” Dr. Botts said.

Read more at WKYT.com.

When a child dies by suicide, schools are often tasked with leading students through the grief that inevitably permeates the classroom. It’s a particularly challenging crisis to navigate. Leaders must address stigma, complex emotions, and death, while also working to prevent other deaths by suicide.

Though not a new problem, districts across the country are struggling to keep pace with students’ heightened mental health needs, a problem only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Youth depression rates are on the rise, and suicide is the second leading cause of death for children aged 10-24.

The most recent CDC Youth Risk Behavior survey, released in February, showed 22 percent of high school students—nearly one in four—seriously considered attempting suicide during the past year; 18 percent made a suicide plan; and 10 percent attempted suicide. LGBTQ+ students were most likely to report having suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

Unfortunately, many schools and districts will be faced with responding to a student’s death by suicide. And because youth are the most prone to a phenomenon known as “suicide contagion”—when exposure to suicide or suicidal behavior influences others to attempt suicide—it is critical that they respond appropriately.

Read more at EdWeek.org.

An Arizona company has won a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for a mental health app that aims to reduce suicide by military veterans on the Navajo Nation.

The company, Phoenix-based Televëda Systems Inc., was founded in response to co-founder Shruti Gurudanti’s observation of a massively underserved healthcare problem: isolation.

“I was very close with my grandfather who suffered from age-related chronic conditions that made him homebound,” Gurudanti said, according to the company’s website. “It was a difficult time, and one that made me come to a stark realization: loneliness and social isolation are massive healthcare problems that need to be addressed. Loneliness is a major predictor of functional decline and death, and bringing individuals together can improve a society’s physical, mental, and social health.”

Televëda’s grant-winning project, Project Hózhó—meaning ‘balance’ in Diné—is a mental health app in development that’s designed for and by Navajo veterans. Televëda is creating the app in partnership with Black Hills Center For American Indian Health, an organization aimed at improving the health of Natives living on reservations in South Dakota and Arizona.

The app will use traditional storytelling and talking circles in a hybrid format, with an aim to reduce veteran suicide and improve access to Veterans Affairs resources.

While Native Americans serve in the United States’ armed forces at five times the national average, Native veterans also suffer from disproportionate suicide rates. Over the past two decades, suicide rates among Native American and Alaska Native veterans receiving care in the Veterans Health Administration system increased by nearly 150%, according to a study conducted by researchers for the US Department of Veterans Affairs Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center for Suicide Prevention and published in Medical Care in March 2022.

Read more at NativeNewsOnline.net.

In August 2021, nearly 76,000 Afghan refugees navigated bureaucratic confusion, experienced painful family separation and witnessed harrowing violence as they fled Kabul in the wake of the Taliban’s return and were airlifted to American military bases. More than 300 are now safely settled in Rhode Island, but they are still grappling with a myriad of challenges.

That’s according to a new report co-authored by researchers at Brown University and leaders at Providence’s Refugee Dream Center. Drawing on 32 interviews with refugees now settled in Rhode Island, many of whom were employed by the United States government in Afghanistan as pilots, soldiers, cooks or translators, the report also offers eight recommendations for local, national and global leaders involved in refugee resettlement.

The report’s lead author is Alexandria Nylen, a research associate at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies within Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Nylen said the refugees’ stories provide a richer understanding of how the withdrawal of American troops, and the Taliban’s subsequent rise to power, affected individuals and families in Afghanistan. They also contain valuable lessons for military leaders, nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations and policymakers who work together to relocate those caught in the crossfire of conflict worldwide.

“Even though their physical move to the U.S. happened more than a year ago, the Afghan evacuees’ resettlement in the U.S. — bureaucratically, socially, emotionally — is an ongoing process that is far from over,” Nylen said. “It is our hope that the insights from their interviews, combined with our own background research, can help all of us improve refugees’ experiences, from evacuation to resettlement.”

Read more at Brown.edu.

With some soil, colorful pots and a variety of succulents, Magaly Garcia will teach mental well-being. Mental well-being is still widely stigmatized in communities of color, especially in the Latino community.

In East Los Angeles, The Wellness Center — a free program at the Los Angeles General Medical Center — is taking a creative approach to prioritize mental well-being among the large Latino population of the eastside by coupling creative workshops with regular mental health services.

“It keeps us busy, we’re working with nature,” said Garcia. “Gardening has shown to help with stress and anxiety and also just a fun activity to have outside in the sunshine.”

Garcia works as a wellness navigator at the center and is tasked with innovating ways to expand on traditional mental health service. She recently led a gardening workshop to teach stress management to women of the eastside.

“A lot of the ladies understand that they are not alone,” she said. “They have a lot of things in common a lot of experiences that they’ve gone through as well.”

Through community-focused, cultural and language-relevant workshops, the wellness center has been able to open the minds of a community who often pushes back on mental health.

“If you’re depressed and don’t feel like doing anything, you get told lazy,” said Garcia. “If you have anxiety, they tell you it’s all in your head.”

Read more at SpectrumNews1.com.

An estimated 326,000 to 580,000 individuals experience sheltered homelessness in the United States each night, putting them at risk for depression, anxiety, serious mental illness, substance use, and physical health problems. Nonetheless, little is known about their treatment needs, particularly of community-dwelling unhoused individuals living outside the country’s major urban centers.

In a study just published in Community Mental Health Journal, Andrew Subica, an associate professor of social medicine, population, and public health in the School of Medicine, and colleagues are the first to detail the scope of substance use, mental health, and health outcomes of unhoused individuals in Hawai‘i County.

In 162 community surveys (e.g., at encampments, beaches, parks), the researchers found extreme levels of illicit drug use with 86% of Hawai’i County’s unhoused reporting lifetime meth use and 60% and 33% reporting illicit prescription pill use and heroin use, respectively. Specifically, they found 12% screened positive for opioid addiction — six times greater than the 2% U.S. population rate — and 74% had methamphetamine addiction. More than half of participants suffered from mental illness with 57% and 56% of participants screening positive for clinical depression and anxiety disorder, respectively, and 86% reported fair/poor health.

In addition to severe problems with drug use, mental illness, and poor health, the team found severe racial disparities in Hawai‘i’s unhoused with 77% reporting Native Hawaiian heritage despite Native Hawaiian constituting just 13% of the Big Island’s population, indicating Indigenous Native Hawaiians may make up most of the unhoused persons in Hawai‘i County.

Read more at InsideUCR.edu.