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During my early years of adolescence, I knew I was depressed. I always felt anxious and worried, and I would express those feelings. But, more often than not, I was criticized and invalidated by those around me. I was told to “stop complaining and toughen up.” This isn’t unusual in the Latinx community. We’re constantly working to maintain a positive work ethic, to provide for our families, to ignore any and all personal issues — because “if you can’t see it,” some like to say, “it isn’t real.”

Many of my mental health symptoms were rooted in trauma I experienced growing up in a low-income community and the effects that come with it: experiencing housing insecurity, confronting scarcity on a daily basis, constantly worrying about money.

For many traditional Latinx folks, mental health issues simply don’t exist. I’ve seen folks around me suppressing their emotions due to traditional beliefs around machismo (a toxic “hustle mentality” around work), emotionally consuming familial practices, and, most significantly, not having the resources to properly address them.

It wasn’t until I recognized how toxic, unstable, and uncertain my lived experience as a Latinx person was when I started to dig into the cause of why I’d always felt so anxious, neglected, and misunderstood.

Read more at Healthline.com.

The exact impact of Covid-19 on Filipino Americans is impossible to know because death data on Asian American subgroups is lumped into a single category. But exclusive data from a recent survey shows that Covid-19 has had a significant impact on Filipino American mental health: More than half of respondents reported anxiety, depression and worrying, among a number of symptoms. Of those respondents, 85 percent attributed them to the pandemic.

The heightened concern many feel about elderly family members with underlying health conditions potentially becoming infected has been a source of worry for Filipino Americans — 34 percent of whom live in multigenerational households, according to Pew Research Center — throughout the pandemic. What made it even more worrying for Filipino Americans is that many live in multigenerational households, said Christine Catipon, a licensed clinical psychologist in Los Angeles.

Those figures are higher than the 46 percent of Asian Americans who reported anxiety during the pandemic, 15 percent of whom had depressive symptoms, according to a report from the coalition Stop AAPI Hate. Researchers also found a stronger link between those symptoms and experiences and anti-Asian racism, compared to the effects of other general Covid-related stressors, Charles Liu, assistant professor of psychology at Wheaton College and researcher for the report, said in an email.

Mental health professionals serving Filipino American clients who spoke with NBC Asian America affirmed survey findings. They said reasons for the reported symptoms ranged from loss of employment to finances. But for a community that places high value on socialization, the loss of social support due to physical distancing guidelines was a significant stressor.

Read more at NBCNews.com

When police took Carlos Yazzie to jail on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico after his arrest on a bench warrant in January 2017, he needed immediate medical attention. His foot was swollen and his blood alcohol content was nearly six times the legal limit. But law enforcement decided that he was fine, jail records show. They put Yazzie in a cramped isolation cell at the Shiprock District Department of Corrections facility instead of taking him to a hospital and then left him unmonitored for six hours without periodic staff checks as required, according to an investigative report. When a guard handing out inmate jumpsuits the next morning stopped at Yazzie’s cell, the 44-year-old day laborer was dead. It would later be determined in an autopsy that he died from acute alcohol poisoning, which is easily treatable by medical professionals, experts said.

Yazzie is one of at least 19 men and women who have died since 2016 in tribal detention centers overseen by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), according to an investigation by NPR and the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration of NPR member stations. Several of them died after correctional officers failed to provide proper and timely medical care, records show.

Federal officials have known about the mistreatment of inmates and other problems at the detention centers for nearly two decades. A 2004 federal investigation found widespread deaths, inmate abuse, attempted suicides, inhumane conditions, and other issues in many of the more than 70 detention centers scattered throughout the U.S., including in Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Wisconsin and Mississippi. The Interior Department’s inspector general told congressional lawmakers during a hearing on the matter then that the facilities were a “national disgrace.”

Read more at NPR.org.

Despite the global conversation surrounding mental health opening up in sports as athletes share their struggles, many athletes of color, particularly Black women, continue to face harsh scrutiny.

Simone Biles’ decision to drop out of gymnastics competitions earlier this week was met with support from her teammates, retired Olympians, and fans. But it was also met with criticism, complaints that she is spoiled and that she let down her team and country.

Seanna C. Leath, assistant professor of Community Psychology at the University of Virginia and contributor for Psychology Today, said that scrutiny is due to a lack of space. Black women are not able to bring their whole selves to professional sports. Leath noted how Black women tend to experience more significant criticism when trying to advocate for themselves, and when they do, there is backlash for it.

“We saw this similarly with Naomi Osaka and Allyson Felix,” Leath said. “This disregard for Black women’s health and their psychological well-being.”

According to data from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, almost 63% of Black people believe that having a mental health condition is a sign of personal weakness. The study says that many members of the Black community feel they will experience shame about having a mental illness and worry about facing possible discrimination due to their condition.

Read more at Cleveland.com.

In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects a partner organization to highlight once a month. Family Ties Enterprises, has been selected as the Partner of the Month for August.

Family Ties Enterprise is a organization that assists families in skill and resource development necessary to safely maintain children in their home in Georgia. They strive that each family has the ability to address any situation they may face. Family Ties, Inc. was founded in 1994 to provide intensive, home-based counseling and community integration services for families and children.

Some of the programs and services that are currently offered:

• Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS) Services – Family Ties is a Licensed Provider approved to provide all services under the Comprehensive Child and Family Assessment (CCFA) program, including family assessments, wrap around services and adolescent assessments. Family Ties, Inc. assists families in the skill and resource development necessary to safely maintain children in their home.
• Medicaid Funded Mental Health Services (CORE) – Family Ties is a Child and Adolescent Medicaid approved Core Provider and a State Fee For Service approved Provider ( which allows uninsured children up to the age of 21 if the child is still in school) access to free in-home mental health services. Family Ties accepts PeachState, WellCare,  and Medicaid . They Provide in-home services in the following counties: Cherokee, Cobb, Dekalb, Douglas, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Hall, Henry, and Rockdale.
• TeleMental Health –  Giving people the opportunity to speak to a clinical team through the use of an online device, ensuring that families has access to services and needs at all times.
• School Based Program Services – For School based services, most referrals are made by the counselor or social worker at one of out partner schools. Families who students attend one of our partner schools can make a referral via our online referral or by downloading and emailing the referral to SBP@familytiesinc.com.

Learn more about Family Ties Enterprises and their belief that with proper support, education and encouragement, families can establish goals and a value base that will guide them in their development; and that values dictate actions and only through a change of values can true behavioral change take place.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.

In the past few years, opioids have seen an increase in media attention, as the country grapples with what has been called an opioid epidemic. However, opioid addiction is not just a plague of recent decades; the phenomenon of widespread opioid addiction dates back to the 19th century when the Civil War sparked the United States’ first opiate addiction epidemic among ailing veterans. Nineteenth-century opiate addiction cases usually originated in doctors’ prescriptions, a disturbing parallel with today’s ongoing opioid crisis resulting from opioid overprescribing during the 1990s.

The alarming parallels between the 19th- and 21st-century opioid crises in the United States are not limited to iatrogenesis. Both crises exhibit a history of troubling racial inequalities in access to opioids as well. Addiction was far more common among White Civil War veterans than among Black veterans, who lacked equitable access to opiates. This pattern presaged the opioid underprescribing experienced by Black Americans in recent decades.

Racial disparities in access to essential opioid medicines has been a persistent feature in American health care, both during the Civil War era and in recent decades. Amidst the ongoing opioid crisis, multiple studies have found that Black Americans are less likely to suffer from prescription opioid addiction than White Americans. Like Black Civil War veterans in the late 19th century, African Americans today have less access to prescription opioid painkillers than White Americans. Persistent racial disparities in opioid prescribing rates have been so extreme that, until recently, White Americans were about twice as likely to die from prescription opioid overdose as African Americans.

Read more PsychiatricTimes.com.