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In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects a partner organization to highlight once a month. Native American Connections, Inc. has been selected as the Partner of the Month for November in celebration of National Native American Heritage Month.

Since 1972, Native American Connections, Inc. has been changing lives, strengthening families, and building healthy communities. It began as a small grassroots organization operating one program for Native American men in recovery from substance use disorder. Today, Native American Connections owns and operates 22 sites throughout Phoenix offering a continuum of affordable housing, health, and community development services that touch and change the lives of over 10,000 individuals and families each year.

Some of the programs and services that are currently offered:

• Family Healing
• Counseling and Case Management
• Outpatient Treatment for Substance Use
• Residential Treatment for Substance Use
• Recovery Program for Young Adults

Learn more about Native American Connections, Inc. and its mission to improve the lives of individuals and families through Native American culturally appropriate health, affordable housing, and community development services.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.

There are an estimated 22 military veterans who take their lives every day according to the Military Veteran Project. What do we need to know about mental health for those who serve? It’s a combination of awareness, community effort, and removing the stigma.

“You know all of a sudden I’m locking my doors six, seven times, I’m sleeping with a shotgun next to my bed, you know it’s these little things, cause you just think of security,” said Cody Knapp is a former specialist for the Army National Guard. Knapp served in Guantanamo Bay as a prison guard and tells me the area where he was stationed was looked at as a vacation spot among other military personnel.

Katie Coric is a Suicide Prevention Coordinator for Veteran’s Affairs. She notes that one issue surrounding mental health is the stigma which betters over time as a community effort, “You know maybe if I go to mental health counseling I let a few people know and maybe that decreases the stigma if they need to go to mental health counseling. I think being willing to share our own experiences with mental health and kind of what helped us helps too,” said Coric.

Read more at News10.com.

The impact of the coronavirus on Hispanic and Latinx populations, who have been disproportionately affected, has been discerning. Adding to the challenges, the community has been coping with a mental healthcare system that wasn’t built with them in mind. To adequately move forward in meeting the mental health needs of Hispanics-Latinxs, beyond conventional structures and practices, thought leaders say it is critical to focus on culture. Although some aspects of culture contribute to stigmatized views of mental health, it might also be the solution.

“We were comfortable because we just put our heads down, and we’d keep going, and I think that’s what we’d been taught to do. Sigue, sigue, sigue, trabajando, sigue. Go, go, go, go, go, and when we look up again, we find ourselves in chaos because we haven’t looked up in so long.”

Mental health counselor and owner of Advocacy and Education Consulting Pamela Fullerton describes the mentality culturally ingrained into many Hispanics-Latinos: no matter what, keep working. As a result, conversations about self-care, work-life balance, and mental health are much less common, which comes at a price.

Laura Martinez, Mental Health Equity and Inclusion Director of NAMI Illinois, says that culture influences people’s issues and how they cope with things like grief. She says that mental health providers continue to do a disservice to people of color by not implementing their customs into treatment. It may be a trial and error process to find one’s individualized and preferred method, but doing so creates trust and allows people to feel more comfortable opening up.

Read more at ChicagoReporter.com.

Asian American elders experience significantly lower life satisfaction and receive less emotional support than their peers of other races, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.

The research, published in January and peer-reviewed, draws on 2018 data from the California Health Interview Survey, the largest state health survey in the U.S. The sample consisted of nearly 8,200 individuals 65 years and older, including people of Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese descent.

Among Asian Americans, Korean elders reported the lowest level of life satisfaction, at 40 percent. Less than one-third of Korean participants said they received needed social and emotional support, compared to nearly two-thirds of Chinese and Filipino respondents.

DJ Ida, executive director of the National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association, said a number of social and cultural factors make aging a particularly agonizing process for people from marginalized communities.

“In general, mental health needs increase as people get older,” she said, noting that physical and emotional exhaustion, as well as “the sense of anxiety around the meaning of life,” all grow more acute with age. “But our health care facilities are not adequate for the needs of the Asian community.”

Read more at NBCNews.com.

Brought Plenty remembers the day she was taken out of class and sent to boarding school, away from her grandparents’ house where she lived.

“I was sitting up in the corner by one of the windows, and I saw two men come walking in the door,” Plenty said. “They had the black suits on with a white shirt and black tie, walked in the school and he was talking to the teacher. Then she pointed at me, and they just came over and each one of them grabbed me by my arms and walked me out.”

Plenty was just 6 years old at the time. She is now 70, and the experiences at the Pierre Indian Boarding school in South Dakota are ones that still stay with her. At that time, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families by the federal government and placed in boarding schools to culturally strip them of their identities, languages, and beliefs.

Since Interior Secretary Deb Haaland made the reckoning and accounting of federally-run boarding schools a priority during her administration, hundreds of Indigenous people like Plenty have come forward to testify about their experiences during their time in the boarding schools.

All of them experienced things like Plenty did: both physical and mental abuse, including the pain of being separated from their families. Many boarding school survivors just started talking about the years of abuse they endured for the first time. Those experiences are passed down to children and other family members in the form of intergenerational trauma.

Tribal and spiritual practices that are from the survivors’ tribal nations, traditional forms of healing-like ceremony, and the sense of community are what some psychologists who are part of the Society of Indian Psychologists say are important to healing.

Read more at Newsy.com.

Wondering what behavioral health data is available to support work in your community? We invite you to join this informational virtual workshop led by Herman Alvarado, a Supervisory Social Science Analyst at SAMHSA’s Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, who will provide an overview of how to access SAMHSA’s available data on the Behavioral Health Services Information System (BHSIS) and Online Treatment Locator. This opportunity intends to provide technical assistance to National Network to Eliminate Disparities in Behavioral Health (NNED) members (free to join) and minority-serving and under-resourced community-based organizations (CBOs). This event is a continuation of the Elevate CBOs Webinar Series, an overarching policy-driven initiative from SAMHSA’s Office of Behavioral Health Equity which began in 2021.

After attending this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Describe the different components of the BHSIS.
• Understand how to access BHSIS data and their potential use in research and grant writing.
• Explain the interaction between BHSIS and SAMHSA’s Online Treatment Locator.

Speaker:

Herman Alvarado
Supervisory Social Science Analyst
SAMHSA’s Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality (CBHSQ)

The event was also shared on Facebook Live at fb.com/nned.net and closed captioning was available through Zoom.

“Elevate CBOs” is an overarching policy-driven initiative at SAMHSA’s OBHE to build capacity, increase the visibility, and highlight the unique role of CBOs serving under-resourced communities in behavioral health.