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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. Partnership for Child Health has been selected as the Partner of the Month for August.

Over the past two decades, Partnership for Child Health (the Partnership), has evolved as a uniquely successful trans-disciplinary Center of Excellence to advocate for and develop and implement services, programs, and systems of care to advance the child health priorities of local communities.

The Partnership’s programs, services, and systems of care have served the widest possible spectrum of children and families struggling with complex medical conditions, mental, behavioral and addiction health disorders, developmental disabilities, access to dental care, family violence and dysfunction, poverty, child trafficking, etc.

Their current work, Family Engagement for Mental Health, offers specialty training classes to community members that address various behavioral health topics.

Learn more about Partnership for Child Health and its mission to become a catalyst in lifting the health and well-being of all children in Florida.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.

After being largely under the radar for three years, Hollywood actor Constance Wu broke her silence last week, opening up about her mental health, and in doing so, admitting there’s still a lot of work left to do for and within the Asian American community. 2019 social media backlash led her to a mental health crisis and a suicide attempt, Wu revealed on Twitter last week.

“I was afraid of coming back on social media because I almost lost my life from it,” Wu wrote. “[Asian Americans] don’t talk about mental health enough. While we’re quick to celebrate representation wins, there’s a lot of avoidance around the more uncomfortable issues within our community.”

“Asian American women want to be their authentic selves but their image and behavior are prescribed by society and family expectations,” says Hyeouk Chris Hahm, an associate dean of research at Boston University’s School of Social Work, who has extensively studied mental health disparities in the Asian American community.

While no two experiences are alike, Hahm points out that in spaces like the workplace, many Asian American women are stereotyped to be soft-spoken, respectful, and followers rather than leaders. When they try to break out of that mold by speaking up for themselves, they can be met with pushback, Hahm added.

Read more at NPR.org.

During a difficult time in our country where the rights and safety of LGBTQIA+ youth are under attack, nonprofit The Trevor Project released a new research brief that examines the role trauma can play on suicide risk for this community of young people.

Building on past understanding of the elevated presence of trauma-related events in the lives of LGBTQIA+ young people, this new data offers a clear window into the negative effects all of this trauma can have on the overall mental health of these youth. It especially shows how acutely this impacts vulnerable groups within the greater LGBTQIA+ community – especially those with intersectional identities, from people of color to transgender and nonbinary youth to multisex individuals.

Experts say this research is a needed wake-up call to society to offer better support and safeguards for these young people, especially as they continue to navigate a world that can seem hostile and unsupportive.

The new brief reveals that 37% of these youth reported “high levels of trauma symptoms.” When zeroing in on who experienced more trauma than others, the survey shows BIPOC (Black and indigenous, people of color), multisex, and trans and nonbinary youth reported the highest levels. The findings reveal 37% of young, BIPOC LGBTQ people experience high levels of trauma symptoms compared to 36% of their white peers.

The group found that LGBTQ youth, who reported high levels of trauma symptoms, showed a drastically increased risk of attempting suicide, about three times greater the odds of attempting suicide in the past year compared to their peers who reported either no trauma symptoms or low-to-moderate trauma symptoms.

Read more at Healthline.com.

July is BIPOC Mental Health Month, a month that recognizes the mental health experiences and struggles unique to Black, Indigenous, and people of color in North America. Not many people know of this month, but whenever we hear about it, we typically read about the numbers on how many of us are experiencing mental illness and distress, the disparities within these numbers, how many of us are getting professional help, and how many are not. These reports aren’t inherently bad, but what doesn’t get discussed as often are the causes as to why mental illness and distress exist in the first place.

A widely known reason why it is more challenging for BIPOC to access mental health services is racial poverty. Another reason why racialized communities do not pursue mental health services is our common suspicions toward therapy. For some of us, there is a historical stigma ingrained when it comes to the topic of mental illness.

Although things are changing within mental health communities, only a few mental health professionals have competent awareness of cultural and racial identity, let alone incorporate this awareness in clinical treatment. This inaccessibility includes but is not limited to language barriers between therapist and client. Undocumented people from immigrant and diasporic communities also need to be vigilant around services with high degrees of surveillance, and therapists are expected to take this seriously as mandated reporters.

What do we do with what we know? Therapy can be very helpful, but we have to remember that therapy is not the standard nor the only place to find healing and safety. Therapy has benefited numerous lives to develop a strong self-awareness in light of their background and trauma, and it is also not the only setting where this type of transformation can occur.

In de-pedestalizing therapy, how can we pursue resources and foster spaces of healing that reside outside the institution and are instead led by BIPOC communities? What if the medicine we are looking for has been within us and our communities all along?

Read more at YesMagazine.org.

You’re invited to attend a community needs assessment data workshop. While this virtual workshop is open to the public, 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).

After attending this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Understand the purpose of a community needs assessment
• Identify who should be involved in a community needs assessment
• Plan and conduct a community needs assessment
• Learn about the impact made by community needs assessment reports

Speaker:

Allison Houston, PhD, MSc, CPH
Epidemiology/Research Scientist
Proscenium Data Solutions

Dr. Allison Houston is a public health epidemiologist and research scientist. She works across academia, government, non-profit, and private sectors, bridging people and technology and advancing health equity using data and evidence-based research.

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

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

“The assault on the mental well-being of our communities reflect the disproportionate physical, emotional, and financial impacts the COVID-19 pandemic has had on Hispanic communities,” said Jane L. Delgado, PhD, MS, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, the Nation’s leading Hispanic health advocacy group. To underscore the needs and to mark the start of National Minority Mental Health Month (July 2022), the National Alliance for Hispanic Health released a series of infographics to highlight the crisis that exists among Hispanic high school students as well as for Hispanic adults.

According to findings released in the infographics, nearly 1 in 5 Hispanic high school students (19.7%) seriously considered suicide, and nearly half (46.6%) reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed a decade-long trend of students’ declining mental health into a national emergency.

The data for adults is also concerning. The data from June 2020 revealed that Hispanic adults were the community most likely to report at least one adverse mental health condition, including anxiety disorder or depressive disorder. Moreover, Hispanics were the group most likely to have considered suicide. Furthermore, treatment rates for Hispanic individuals living with a mental illness are alarmingly low. In 2020, only about a third of Hispanic adults with a mental illness received treatment, compared to nearly half of all non-Hispanic individuals.

Read more at PRNewsWire.com.