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Medical facilities are required by federal law to provide free interpreter services by qualified professionals, but most patients prefer having a Spanish-speaking provider who fully comprehends the nuances. Latino Behavioral Health Services, a nonprofit offering mental health services in Spanish and English, reported upwards of a 300% increase in demand since the pandemic. The nonprofit said the need has always been there but that the community is becoming more educated about how and when to seek help.

Alliance Community Services has been at the forefront of connecting the Hispanic community with health and social resources since its founding in 2002. The nonprofit has a number of partnerships across the state, such as the Ventanilla de Salud program with the Mexican Consulate, which offers free or low-cost health screenings, Medicaid enrollment help and other services in Spanish for anyone in the community who is uninsured or underinsured. Lack of health insurance is one of the biggest issues. In fact, 22% of Hispanic Utahns are uninsured compared to only 6% of white Utahns, according to KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation.

An innovative subscription-based model from the recently launched Vamos! Health could help serve some of that uninsured population along the Wasatch Front. The clinic offers memberships from $60 a month for care from a team of bilingual and culturally fluent providers.

For many providers, fulfilling the Hispanic population’s health care needs goes far beyond simply hiring more Spanish-speaking staff. But training a new generation of health care providers is a yearslong endeavor. In the meantime, Utah has recognized community health workers can fill some of those gaps and create bridges between the health care system and the communities it has historically left behind.

Read more at StateLine.org.

Health care providers in Waianae are calling for more resources to expand their services for a community shaken by high rates of gun violence in the last several years.

Government support and funding has remained stagnant for at least a decade while funding for other programs gutted during the 2008 recession have yet to be fully restored, providers said. Meanwhile, community organizations such as local churches have been doing what they can to fill in the gaps.

There have been at least nine murders and manslaughters on the Waianae Coast this year, according to Honolulu Police Department crime data. In the most recent incident over the Labor Day weekend, a man shot five people and killed three before he was shot and killed by a relative of the victims.

The center recently launched a trauma and resilience program to help residents dealing with the mental toll of violence, which includes workshops, individual counseling and group support sessions. The center is seeking $500,000 from the state and city to help support the program, but will continue those services even if the funding doesn’t come through, Executive Vice President Nicholas Hughey said. The center also needs additional financial assistance for its emergency room.

Hale Naau Pono, a community mental health center right down the hill from the comprehensive health center has also struggled financially. It once provided a broad range of services under the state’s Assertive Community Treatment program, targeted at individuals dealing with acute mental health conditions.

Hale Naau Pono has been doing what it can with limited resources. It operates group homes that provide mental health services and assists adolescents in the state’s child welfare system, providing in-home therapy programs and working with children in foster care.

Read more at CivilBeat.org.

Structured attempts to change an LGBTQIA+ person’s sexual orientation or gender identity — a practice commonly called “conversion therapy” — is linked to greater symptoms of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidality, according to a study led by Stanford Medicine researchers.

The survey-based study of 4,426 people is the first to explore whether specific mental health outcomes vary by the goal of the practice and whether the recipient is cisgender (identifies as the sex they were assigned at birth), transgender or gender diverse (identifies as neither male nor female).

Conversion attempts may include religious rituals, psychological or behavioral counseling, and aversion therapy aimed at promoting heterosexual attraction or aligning a person’s gender identity with their sex assigned at birth. Because they have not been shown to have any therapeutic benefit, these attempts are more appropriately called conversion practices or change efforts.

The negative mental health impacts of conversion practices have been well-documented, and major health care organizations including the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the American Psychiatric Association have denounced their use. Although 23 states and the District of Columbia had banned the practices on minors as of June 2024, conversion practices remain legal in many states.

Read more at Med.Stanford.edu.

The Biden-Harris Administration, through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), announced more than $1.5 billion in awards for fiscal year 2024 State Opioid Response (SOR), Tribal Opioid Response (TOR) and SOR/TOR Technical Assistance grants. This grant funding is a critical investment in President Biden’s Unity Agenda for the Nation and the HHS Overdose Prevention Strategy, and supports evidence-based, holistic practices that address the overdose crisis through prevention; harm reduction, including naloxone and other opioid overdose reversal medications; treatment, including use of medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD); and recovery supports.

Awards for fiscal year 2024 (FY24) build on efforts to ensure opioid overdose reversal medication saturation across communities, ensuring these medications are in the hands of those most likely to experience or witness an overdose. The FY24 awards have an increased focus on services for transitional aged youth and young adults (ages 16-25 years); expand availability of MOUD in correctional settings; and emphasize the role of services that use a whole-person approach by considering an individual’s physical and mental health needs and their social supports. Additionally, TOR awards increased more than 14.5% over FY23 levels, and include a needs-based supplement to support tribes in counties with a high level of overdoses among Tribal members.

Since their inception in 2018, State and Tribal Opioid Response grants have funded treatment and recovery services for people in need across the country. For example, grantees reported more than 177,000 people received treatment for OUD and more than 56,000 people received treatment for stimulant use disorder between September 30, 2021, and September 29, 2022. During that same period, almost 480,000 people received recovery support services. Awards also support overdose prevention and response, with almost 2.7 million naloxone kits distributed and more than 92,000 reported overdose reversals between April 1, 2022 and March 31, 2023.

Read more at HHS.gov.

Farming is a demanding job saddled with stressors like increasingly unpredictable weather, rising input costs and changing commodity prices. On top of those issues, producers of color deal with the impacts of racism, which is linked to mental health conditions like depression and PTSD.

For years, mental health issues have been rising among people living on America’s farms and rural spaces. In Oklahoma, agriculture is a major sector of the economy. There were more than 70,300 farms in 2022, according to the latest Census of Agriculture from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Suicide rates are climbing faster in rural areas. They grew 46% in rural areas compared to about 27% in metro areas from 2000-2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Farmers and ranchers also have higher rates of depression and face barriers to accessing mental health care services, such as traveling longer distances to receive care, affording the costs of services and a shortage of behavioral health providers.

Although Black people often have higher rates of psychological distress than their white counterparts, they are less likely to receive care and get poorer quality of care. In 2018, Black people were also 1.5 times more likely to be uninsured than white people.

For decades, the number of Black producers and the amount of land they own has been sharply declining. One study found Black farmers lost about $326 billion in land wealth and income from 1920-1997. Historic discriminatory practices by the U.S. Department of Agriculture are a factor leading to the loss.

Today, socially disadvantaged producers, especially Black farmers, operate with a higher level of risk and get less government payments, according to a USDA survey. From 2018 to 2020, Black-owned farms were less than a third of the size of operations owned by farmers of other races. Stigma, lack of insurance coverage and travel distance are a few barriers preventing many rural residents from seeking mental health services, according to the Rural Health Information Hub.

Read more at KOSU.org.