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In Honolulu, a local veteran is kicking off a podcast called “1 Mile 1 Veteran” to help prevent suicides in the veteran community.

The host and founder, Danny Mayberry served in the Navy for 11 years with several deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. After returning to Hawaii, he said he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and wants to help veterans with their path to healing.

“These conversations around mental health need to be normalized. We need to get rid of the stigma that seeking help is a sign of weakness. Everything you do in life, you do as a team in a community. We all want to build each other up and that’s what the veteran community wants to do,” said Mayberry.

Suicide among veterans has steadily gone up nationally over the past two decades. According to a report by the Department of Veterans Affairs, suicide accounted for 217 deaths in Hawaii in 2019 and 17 of them were veterans.

However, some officials believe that number is actually higher.

“We have to take everyone into consideration. There are those that are actively serving, those with prior service, those in the reserves and even family members of veterans. A lot of those people have attempted and/or contemplated suicide. That number is significantly higher actually,” said Alim Shabazz, Coast Guard auxiliary member.

The “1 Mile 1 Veteran” podcast kicked off Labor Day and will stream on Spotify, Google Podcast and Apple Podcast.

Host and founder, Danny Mayberry said he wants to help veterans with all forms of health – mental, physical, spiritual relational, and professional, and find ways to fight negative thoughts like stress and anxiety.

Read more at KITV.com.

After years of working with Bhutanese community members in Western Massachusetts, a team led by a University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher has developed a peer-led, family-centered preventive intervention to reduce stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms and promote mental health among immigrants in the U.S.

Poudel-Tandukar, associate professor in the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing, led efforts to adapt PMP as a preventive intervention and develop the program for immigrants (PMP-I) using psychoeducation, problem-solving, behavior activation and mind-body exercise to address immigrants’ multiple stressors.

“Stress is linked with almost all diseases, and anxiety and depression,” says Poudel-Tandukar, who years ago worked with Bhutanese refugees in Nepal, where she then lived and was a clinician. “Members of this group are at high risk for mental health problems due to their exposure to multiple stressors, such as limited language and socio-cultural skills required for acculturation in a new culture. Our baseline study reported a high prevalence of depression (24.0%) and anxiety (34.2%) in this Bhutanese population. I understand their language and their culture. We are working together to address their mental health needs using problem-solving approaches, managing stress and sharing preventive strategies.”

About 90,000 Bhutanese families have been resettled in the U.S. from refugee camps in Nepal since 2008. Beginning in 2015, Poudel-Tandukar worked with Bhutanese community members resettled in Western Massachusetts in collaboration with Bhutanese community leaders.

Poudel-Tandukar started her intervention research with 44 Bhutanese immigrants, 10 of whom were then trained as community interventionists to help other refugees manage stress during a weekly social and emotional well-being program that lasted for five weeks and included 50 families.

Results from her intervention studies published in the Health and Social Care in the Community and Community Mental Health Journal were promising, showing significantly reduced rates of anxiety and depression among participants.

Poudel-Tandukar and colleagues are hopeful that the PMP-1 program they are testing will be expanded around the country to help other immigrant groups. “We plan to replicate the program and network with other refugee organizations, including Ukrainian and Afghani,” Poudel-Tandukar says.

Read more at News-Medical.net.

It’s no secret that there is a stigma in the mental health field, no matter the demographic. People are afraid to go to therapy because of how it may look to other people (for the record, it looks healthy). And while this spans across cultures, when it comes to the Hispanic community, “there is a negative perception about mental health care in general,” said Dr. Ruby Castilla-Puentes, the president of the American Society of Hispanic Psychiatry. Because of this, “there are misunderstandings about mental health.”

This can make it hard for people in the Latine community to realize they need help, talk to loved ones about mental health, and ultimately seek treatment. But, there are many experts who focus on creating safe spaces where people can explore their identity, their emotions, their problems and more.

“Hispanic folks are looking for mental health providers that are culturally competent,” Castilla-Puentes said, adding that this can mean a therapist who speaks Spanish or someone with a deep knowledge of Hispanic-Latino culture.

Castilla-Puentes noted that miscommunication, either because of language barriers or cultural misunderstandings, causes many people in the Latine community to feel misunderstood by people in the mental health field. This can cause a “lack of confidence in the ability to receive the service that they need,” she added.

That being said, Brandie Carlos, the founder of Therapy for Latinx, noted that as a community, there is a large spectrum of cultures and beliefs. “We’re not a monolith,” she said. So, what’s right for one person may not be right for another. “What is most important is to get clear on what is important to you when you’re looking for a therapist,” she noted.

Make a list of the things you want your therapist to understand about you, your family or your culture, or make a list of the languages you want them to speak. Carlos noted that some people don’t want to go through the trouble of translating certain phrases from Spanish to English in therapy, while other people purely want someone who will speak English. It’s a totally personal preference.

Additionally, you should decide what goals you want to achieve in therapy and what subject areas you want to focus on. From there, ask questions when you meet with therapists to see if they are a fit for you.

Read more at HuffPost.com.

“Coming out” can be a complex event in an LGBTQIA+ person’s life. It can be fraught with tension, a source of stress, or, on the flip side, a time of renewed sense of self and identity. Essentially, coming out is incredibly personal and looks different for everyone — something a day of awareness and community like ‘National Coming Out Day’ directs a spotlight toward.

For young people who are part of the greater LGBTQ community, factors like how old they are and the type of environment in which they are coming out can play a big role in shaping their experience.

Nonprofit The Trevor Project released a new research brief that paints a picture of these realities, including the fact that today’s queer youth are coming out at younger ages.

One key finding: Whether or not an LGBTQ youth has access to positive, safe support systems can play a direct role in that young person’s positive or negative mental health outcomes, including suicide risk.

Among the findings, LGBTQ youth are coming out about their sexual orientations at younger ages than in the past. Those in the sample who were ages 13 to 17 came out on average at age 13, compared to peers who were 18 to 24, whose average age of coming out was 16.

The Trevor Project found that 24% of the overall sample of participants came out before 13. To put this in perspective, 35% of LGBTQ youth 13 to 17 years old came out before they were 13, in contrast to only 8% of those young people between 18 and 24 years old.

When asked why LGBTQ youth might be coming out at younger ages now, Myeshia Price, PhD, the Director of Research Science at The Trevor Project, told Healthline that while the nonprofit can’t directly tie this to one specific reason, “young people increasingly have more access to language, education, and representation around LGBTQ people and identities” now more than ever before.

The research brief shows that those who came out earlier than 13 “reported higher rates of victimization due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

They found 31% of those who came out before 13 reported being physically threatened or harmed as a result of their disclosure of their sexual orientation or gender identity, compared to 20% of their older peers who came out after 13 years old.

Read more at Healthline.com.

In response to the urgent need for resources to address the youth mental health crisis in our local communities, Hawai‘i Medical Service Association is investing $125,000 to support five unique programs across the state.

The KIDS COUNT 2022 Hawaiʻi profile found that the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant effect on Hawaiʻi’s young people. Nearly 2,200 more youth struggled with anxiety or depression in 2020 than in 2016, an increase of 23%.

“Our teenage population is struggling due to limited access to mental health resources, and we need to work together to support overall health conditions,” said Hawaiʻi Medical Service Association President and CEO Mark M. Mugiishi, M.D., F.A.C.S.

According to Hawaiʻi Health Matters, the most recent data on Hawaiʻi teens who attempted suicide in 2019 show that 3.2% of public high school students reported at least one suicide attempt that required medical attention, compared to 2.5% nationally.

The numbers are even more staggering for Native Hawaiians or when broken down by county. Investments by the Hawaiʻi Medical Service Association will support partner organizations and their work to address root causes of these disparities while providing innovative crisis support.

Mental Health America of Hawaiʻi, an organization that seeks to promote mental health and wellness through education, advocacy, service and access to care statewide, is one of the beneficiaries of this initiative. The funding will help the organization expand the reach of its statewide Youth Suicide and Bullying Prevention program with special emphasis placed on reaching youth and youth-serving adults in rural and isolated parts of the state. Since 2008, that prevention program has trained nearly 30,000 Hawaiʻi youth and youth-serving adults and has evolved to include components like Suicide Prevention 101 and Youth Mental Health First Aid certifications for adults.

“We project that we will reach an additional 2,000 youth and 1,000 youth-serving adults over the course of a year as a direct result of HMSA’s support,” said Bryan Talisayan, executive director of Mental Health America of Hawaiʻi.

Read more at MauiNow.com.

The most expensive disease in the United States is not what you think it may be: cancer. It is Alzheimer’s Disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that tends to affect people who are older in age. Most people know someone who has had Alzheimer’s, whether it be a family member or a friend of a family member. Some people are caregivers to someone with Alzheimers, and some people with ADRD live in a nursing home. People often don’t know what resources are available to people with Alzheimers when they are having a mental health crisis. This summer, I interned for the Alzheimer’s Association of Houston and Southeast chapter to research the public policy in this area to figure out how to improve it. Public policy is a wide variety of different laws and regulations that affect society. In my work, I focused on researching the intersection of mental health and Alzheimer’s in public policy. My goal was to help the Association create a protocol for when people with Alzheimer’s are having a mental health crisis.

My boss recognized a gap in Alzheimer’s resources allocated to Alzheimers within nursing homes, assisted living places, and government policy. There were not a lot of existing resources for people with Alzheimer/Dementia Related Disorders (ADRD) who had experienced a mental health crisis. The idea that mental health professionals should have trained police (or sometimes a different unit within the police department) to receive mental health calls, is a relatively new one. Out of Texas’ major cities, the oldest police department’s crisis intervention team is only a little over two decades old.

This is a problem when loved ones of people with ADRD call the police on them for having a mental health episode, whether it be threatening violence to their caregiver, having suicidal ideation, or having symptoms after refusing their psychiatric medication. Police departments’ crisis intervention teams don’t always know what to do. These people may be threatening violence to their caregivers, experiencing suicidal ideation, or refusing to take psychiatric drugs prescribed to help them. Most of the time these people are not actively suicidal or homicidal, so sending them to a psychiatric hospital, or putting them in jail would be inappropriate. Police taking them to a psychiatric hospital would be inappropriate, as the most of the time these people with ADRD having suicidal nor homicidal ideation, but being put in jail is not an appropriate solution either. This is a problem because sending patients back to the nursing home or to their home with their caregiver often doesn’t address the issue. So what do they do? That’s what I set out to research.

Read more at Megaphone.Southwestern.edu.