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Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people, and according to Indian Health Services, American Indians and Alaska Natives are particularly vulnerable. Some Indigenous youth don’t benefit from western style therapy.

“There’s a lack of mental health resources that are made available and specifically cater to indigenous people,” said Blu Cornell. “It’s not just if you’re doing well physically, we take into consideration your spiritual health, your mental health, your physical health, and all these different factors that play into that.”

She wants the system to change. She wants to Indigenize mental health care.

Dee BigFoot is a child psychologist and the director of the Indian Country Child Trauma Center at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. She also stresses the importance of culturally enhanced therapy practices.

Dee says because of past experiences with social service organizations, many Indigenous people don’t trust professional mental health services. Something Blu agrees with. She also thinks that non-Native therapists don’t know how to deal with something a lot of Native people struggle with: intergenerational trauma.

Read more at KOSU.org.

Three in five college students nationwide reported being diagnosed with anxiety, depression or another mental health condition by a professional, according to a Harris Poll released this year.

To help meet the unique needs of Native Hawaiian students at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) Department of Native Hawaiian Health launched Ka Malu a Waʻahila. The program is free to students and was developed at the request of the UH Mānoa Kūaliʻi Native Hawaiian Advisory Council and funded by the UH Mānoa Office of the Provost.

“This is an important service being provided to our kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) students and I commend the Waʻahila program and JABSOM, our school of medicine, for stepping up and meeting this challenge. We need to support all of our student needs so they are able to focus on their studies and this program will provide an invaluable service,” said UH Mānoa Provost Michael Bruno.

Students have access to individual therapy services, monthly kūkākūkā (discussion) group support sessions, and additional tools for self-help and resiliency via the program’s website and social media platforms.

Students from across the UH system also have access to the MyHealthStory2 app, a video-based digital platform designed to capture student experiences relating to mental health. The interactive app was developed in partnership with HealthTechApps, a Native Hawaiian-owned and-operated tech startup founded through the UH Mānoa Innovation Center.

Read more at Hawaii.edu.

It is well known that exposure to racism and discrimination are linked to various adverse mental health outcomes. The effects of systemic racism on Black Americans have been persistent and profound, and the increase in media reports and images of police brutality and violence inflicted upon members of the Black community have only added insult to injury. The impact can be chronic and traumatic events related to racism have been unrelenting for Black people.

As mental health challenges continue to rise, some Black Americans are still not receiving the mental health care and treatment they may need. This is especially true for Black men, who are not only affected by the general barriers to medical treatment that many in the Black community face, but who also have internalized certain behaviors that fit within the social constructs of Black masculinity — ultimately impacting their help-seeking behaviors. Despite known or suspected mental health issues, Black men are for numerous reasons often reluctant to seek treatment.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health reports that Black adults are more likely than white adults to experience persistent symptoms of emotional distress, such as sadness, hopelessness, and feeling that they have to dedicate extra effort to everything they do.

Adding to these factors for Black men specifically are traditional masculinity roles and ideas across racial and ethnic backgrounds that have caused men to struggle with being vulnerable and sharing their emotions — making them even more reluctant to seek help. A growing body of research and commentary looks specifically at how Black masculinity norms and presumptions affect mental health among Black men.

Read more at Forbes.com.

Last December, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announced that we are in the midst of a youth mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 44% of high school students feel persistently sad and hopeless, and emergency room visits for suicide attempts increased 31% in 2020 compared to 2019.

As a society, we’re doing a terrible job of helping. Part of the reason is stigma. Courtney Saunders, a therapist in Massachusetts, says she sees a lot of kids come in whose parents don’t understand the importance of mental health. “A lot of kids feel unheard and unseen, their experiences don’t seem as important as what the adults are dealing with,” she says. Part of the reason is structural — and it is to our detriment because, after all, the kids are our future.

The youth mental health crisis didn’t come from nowhere — it was already simmering in the background prior to the pandemic, Vivek Murthy pointed out during the American Psychological Association’s annual conference this year. To begin with, about half of mental disorders in America go untreated, according to the National Alliance on Mental Health. On average, if a child is diagnosed with a mental disorder, it can take up to 11 years before they receive treatment — if they receive treatment at all.

Read more at FastCompany.com.

A new film about a bank robbery in Metro Atlanta is raising new questions about mental healthcare for black veterans. The movie titled “Breaking” tells the story of Iraq war veteran Brian Easley’s 2017 hostage standoff at a Wells Fargo bank on Windy Hill Road in Cobb County. When Easley walked into the bank in the summer of 2017, he was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Easley called the WSB-TV newsroom and said he had a bomb. Easley promised not to harm hostages but voiced his frustration with Veteran’s Affairs after he said he didn’t get his disability check. Easley was shot and killed by police during the incident.

Channel 2 Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell spoke with Dr. Bakari Vickerson, a faculty psychiatrist for Morehouse School of Medicine, about the struggle black veterans face when it comes to mental illness and the resources that are needed for veterans in general.

“In telling his story, you’re not just telling his story, but you’re telling the story of many veterans, black male veterans who have had somewhat of a similar experience. Maybe it didn’t get to the extreme in which they felt they had to go to a bank in order to hear their challenges, or to make sure their challenges were heard. They all go through similar challenges, and a lot of times, that can leave a person feeling alone. Feeling as if they have done so much for this country but yet have not received enough, or anything in return. I know some of the issues that they’ve had to face just growing up black here in this country — let alone to couple that with either serving in the military or actually serving in combat,” said Dr. Vickerson.

Dr. Vickerson has experience working with black men in the military as well as veterans.

“Mental health should be a stronger component of military services because the risk is so great. The risk is so great that we should already have something in place to screen and also treat veterans as soon as possible,” said Dr. Vickerson.

Read more at WSBTV.com.

In scrolling black ink, LeToy “Toy” Lunderman illustrates intergenerational trauma like this: three big circles represent three generations, the first circle nearly empty but for a sliver of solid—representing all that was taken from survivors of boarding school—and the subsequent circles gradually filling with solid until the last circle is whole again.

She’s the middle circle, the conduit between hardship and healing, among the generation of children born in the mid ‘70s who grew up in the years immediately after the federal government abandoned its Indian Boarding School policy.

But it would take her a while to recognize how deeply she’s been impacted by a school system she didn’t directly experience, though she was educated in the same buildings where many in the generations before her experienced abuse: Saint Francis Indian School, formerly Saint Francis Mission, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

‘Historical trauma’ is a term that came of age alongside Lunderman. First coined in the 1980s by Native American social worker and mental health expert, Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart (Hunkpapa/Oglala Lakota), the term conceptualized historical trauma as the “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding, over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma.”

Read more at NativeNewsOnline.net.