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When San Francisco commissioned a study in 1971 about the mental health of local children, it found that only one Chinese American kid in the city was receiving mental health treatment.

“There weren’t linguistically and culturally appropriate services,” retired mental health social worker Nancy Lim-Yee explained.

And as a result, she said, the vast majority of Chinese American children simply weren’t seeking the help they needed. A year after that 1971 study, the Chinatown Child Development Center (CCDC) was established under federal funding and later became a program of the city’s Department of Public Health. Now, some 50 years after its founding, the organization is still fighting some of the same stigma that prevents Asian American families from getting their children psychiatric and psychological services.

Lim-Yee, 70—who worked at CCDC as the director until her retirement in 2014—told The Standard that because of the negative connotations in Chinese language to describe mental health, some Chinese American families hesitate to sign up for therapy and opt to hide the issues. For Chinese immigrant kids, experts say the need for mental health services should be more urgent, given the additional pressures they might face in the United States.

For 50 years, the Chinatown center has been trying to eliminate that stigma against therapy—especially among immigrant parents of struggling kids.

Read more at SFStandard.com.

The suicide rate in the United States has been rising for decades, with some ethnic groups seeing astronomical jumps.

“Native communities experience higher rates of suicide compared to all other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S., with suicide being the eighth leading cause of death for American Indians and Alaska Natives across all ages,” according to the National Indian Council on Aging.

In fact, suicide is the second leading cause of death for Native youth, giving them the highest suicide rate for all racial and ethnic groups. The higher rate of mental illness among Native people is linked to higher levels of domestic violence, historical disenfranchisement, lack of access to adequate healthcare, socioeconomic disadvantages, alcohol and drug abuse at younger ages and at higher rates, and cultural disconnection, according to the National Indian Council on Aging. With so many factors contributing to the high suicide rate, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but the Helena Indian Alliance offers outreach programs to help at-risk Native youth find the support they need.

“We work for a federal grant under the HIA called Native Connections,” the program’s outreach coordinator Matt Hartnett said. “It is a federal grant based on suicide prevention for Native youth age 12 to 24. This age group has the highest rate for suicide. It doesn’t mean we’ll refuse someone else, but those adolescents and young adults are our main focus.”

This program seeks to help the young people reconnect with their ancestral roots through activities that teach them about their culture and provide them with opportunities to spend time together. One aspect of the program, Culture is Prevention, teaches about past traditions.

“We have different lessons and crafts,” Hartnett said. “They learn about beadwork and traditional games and activities. We make them proud of who they are and where they come from, which helps kids find an identity.”

Read more at KXLH.com.

In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects a partner organization to highlight once a month. Fragile Families NETWORK has been selected as the Partner of the Month for December.

Grandfamilies are created when a grandparent or other family member raises the child of a relative unable or unwilling to parent. The Fragile Families NETWORK mission is to provide supportive services to grandfamilies, and education and training to health and human service providers.

Some of the programs and services that are currently offered:

• Virtual Listening Circles
• Support Group
• Wellness Programs
• Faith Services
• Human Service Professionals Education and Training

Learn more about Fragile Families NETWORK and its mission to improve the lives of grandfamilies through mental health support, wellness, and training.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.

When University of Pennsylvania doctoral student Helena Addison worked as a nurse at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, she encountered many people who had previously been incarcerated. The interactions made her want to better understand the mental health fallout from such an experience.

“Initially, I was looking at incarceration as a source of trauma for Black men,” says Addison, a fourth-year Presidential Ph.D. Fellow in Penn’s School of Nursing. “As I learned more, it broadened to the idea of incarceration as a social determinant of health, still specifically looking at mental health.”

In collaboration with Sara Jacoby, an assistant professor in the School of Nursing, Addison evaluated what science currently knows about the psychological ramifications for Black men of going through such a detention. Reviewing nearly two dozen articles from the past decade, she discovered that for this group in the United States there exists a link between incarceration and higher levels of psychological distress, more severe symptoms of PTSD and depression, and many other facets of poor mental health.

“Incarceration is underappreciated as a social determinant of health,” says Jacoby, whose research focuses on trauma and violence. “It’s something that we talk about, but it’s not something that’s always articulated so specifically. This work does so in a way that has been lacking for nursing and a broader health care audience.”

Her main objective had been to identify differences in mental health outcomes between formerly incarcerated and never incarcerated Black men. “In that context,” she says, “both had poor mental health outcomes associated with things like unemployment and family conflict. But Black men who had been incarcerated had more PTSD symptoms. That’s one instance where you can see, despite these groups experiencing some of the same trauma, incarceration specifically had an impact.”

Longer imprisonment and time spent in solitary confinement mattered, too, increasing the negative mental health symptoms formerly incarcerated Black men suffered later. Despite that, Addison and Jacoby found that few of these men discussed seeking help, reporting barriers such as long waits and a need to prioritize different aspects of their reentry like housing or employment.

Read more at PennToday.UPenn.edu.

Bipolar disorder — a mental health condition characterized by periods of extreme highs (mania) and deep lows (depression) — affects 2.8 percent of U.S. adults. While marginalized racial and ethnic communities, such as Black and Hispanic-Latinx people, are no less likely to experience bipolar disorder than white people, research shows that these communities are not adequately diagnosed and treated for it compared with white people.

“Either their symptoms or presenting concerns are minimized, and they are not given any care, or they are given a completely different diagnosis and one where the treatment can be detrimental to the progress they need,” says Taish Malone, PhD, a licensed professional counselor with Mindpath Health in Fort Worth, Texas.

For instance, people of African descent with bipolar disorder are more likely to receive an incorrect diagnosis than people of European ancestry with the condition, according to an article published in September 2018 in Bipolar Disorders. And Hispanic people with bipolar disorder are less likely to get the treatment they need than white people with the condition, per a small study published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.

These disparities have many cultural and societal causes, likely requiring multifaceted solutions. Here’s what researchers know so far about racial and ethnic diagnostic and treatment inequities in bipolar disorder — and ways to solve the problem.

Read more at EverydayHealth.com.

We invite you to join this informational virtual workshop led by Kathy Downey Piscopo and Sam Brown from SAMHSA’s Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality (CBHSQ) to learn how to use SAMHSA data and tools to advance your behavioral health equity work. 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 that began in 2021.

By attending this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Understand SAMHSA’s CBHSQ data sources, including which to use for different types of information
• Learn what kind of reports, data tables, data files, and analytic tools are available via CBHSQ webpages
• Learn how to use CBHSQ’s publicly available analysis tools to find data needed, with an emphasis on data equity information

Speakers:

The event will also be shared on Facebook Live at fb.com/nned.net and closed captioning will be 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.