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When MTV Entertainment Group wants to create original content surrounding marginalized communities, its creation is a hands-off approach.

Instead, it relies on the members of those communities to take the lead and share authentic stories. That was the case for the documentary short “Good Voice Woman,” which is now the lead spot for MTV’s Native American Heritage Month campaign.

The short, directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Kyle Bell, focuses on a young woman named Lakota Beatty who shares how she’s been handling grief in the four and a half years since her sister died by suicide. For Beatty, thinking about her sister’s death sometimes feels like the moment she found out about it, but being an athlete and embracing her roots has helped her wade through the darkness.

“Being Native and knowing that the generations before me have overcome so much,” Beatty says in the film. “Our culture and our ceremonies and our dances … that has been one of the most grounding things for me that has helped me come out on the other side of this.”

Read more at AdWeek.com.

In a normal year, psychologist Nicole Wright sees about 200 patients in her practice at the Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center. Since the pandemic began, her patient load has multiplied to about 1,000.

“It has been crazy,” said Wright, who also directs the community health center’s divisions that provide substance abuse and mental health treatment services. “The pandemic really emphasized a lot of existing issues in the Native Hawaiian community, especially in the Leeward Coast.”

Hawaii has for years struggled with a statewide shortage of mental health professionals, part of a broader shortage of physicians and other medical staff. That gap has been compounded by the pandemic, which has exacerbated mental health problems both nationally and locally. The mental and emotional toll of the pandemic is still unfolding, but health professionals and service professionals who work with the Native Hawaiian community say the recent delta surge’s disproportionate impact on the community has exacerbated existing mental health concerns.

Stacelynn Eli, a Native Hawaiian legislator representing communities in West Oahu that were hit hardest by the latest virus surge, said the pandemic wrought shock, fear, and confusion in her community. Now what’s left is grief.

“It’s just another historical traumatic moment here in our history as Native Hawaiians here in Hawaii,” she said. “We’ve lost so much in just such a short amount of time.”

It wasn’t always that way. For the first year of the pandemic, Hawaii residents who were at least part Native Hawaiian didn’t have disproportionately high rates of Covid-19. The communities facing the worst Covid disparities in Hawaii were other Pacific Islanders and Filipinos. But after vaccinations became available, Native Hawaiians were less likely to get the shot than other communities, according to state data, making them especially vulnerable to the highly contagious virus strain.

Read more at CivilBeat.org.

Veterans’ eating disorders are associated with exposure to trauma and pressure to meet military weight and fitness requirements, said Dr. Sara Rubin, a psychiatrist who heads the Eating Disorders Program at VA Connecticut Healthcare. Also, women who have been sexually assaulted in the military are disposed to eating disorders, she said.

According to Robin M. Masheb, a Yale Medical School psychologist and researcher for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), “so many veterans seem to struggle with their eating and body image, but go unrecognized.”

A study of post 9/11 veterans found that bulimia, binge eating, and atypical anorexia nervosa (AAN) were associated with depression, anxiety, PTSD, insomnia, and a lower quality of life. AAN has symptoms of anorexia, including starvation and extreme fear of weight gain, but without dangerous low weight. The study led by Masheb of more than 1,100 veterans was the first to examine AAN in veterans. It found that 14% of women and 5% of men had probable AAN, “a clinically significant eating and mental health disorder.” The study also showed 6% of the women and 3% of the men had bulimia (binging and purging), three times the civilian rate.

Eating disorders can also result in death. A study by Deloitte Access Economics found that 10,200 people die each year because of an eating disorder. Anorexia nervosa has the second-highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder after opioid use disorder, and one in five deaths among people with anorexia is a suicide, according to the National Eating Disorders Association.

Read more at CTMirror.org.

The children of immigrants may never pass a physical border, but they still face serious barriers to accessing mental health resources in the United States. There’s the challenge of financing therapy or psychiatry and any associated medications—especially given the number of immigrants who are uninsured, which is roughly 23 percent of lawfully present immigrants and 45 percent of undocumented immigrants (excluding elderly populations), according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis. There are language barriers. And there are race barriers—with fewer people of color using psychological resources and fewer people of color working in psychology.

But the strictly cultural barriers are just as pervasive, though they’re harder to quantify. In reporting this story, second-generation immigrants have shared with me, myself a second-generation immigrant, the sense that “therapy just didn’t exist” to their parents, or was “deeply stigmatized.” (The people interviewed asked to remain anonymous to protect personal details and medical history, and also to protect the identity of their family members.)

It’s an experience that’s often overlooked in broader conversations about immigrant mental health, despite more than 18 million people under age 18 living with at least one immigrant parent as of 2017, according to the Migration Policy Institute—a figure that represented 26 percent of the 70 million kids in the U.S. at that time. While there’s no way to catalog the specific stressors that affect such a wide swath of cultures and countries—and it would be disrespectful to consider the category of “immigrant” itself as a monolith—there are fairly universal cultural barriers. Having U.S. citizenship doesn’t render children immune to immigration-related stressors. They must learn to be flexible, able to withstand constantly straddling the culture their parents came from and the culture they’re currently growing up in.

Read more at Vice.com.

In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects a partner organization to highlight once a month. American Indian Resource Center, Inc., has been selected as the Partner of the Month for November in celebration of Native American Heritage Month.

The American Indian Resource Center, Inc. is non-profit corporation with the state of Oklahoma with all members of the Board of Directors being American Indian. The mission of the American Indian Resource Center, Inc. is to develop culturally appropriate resources to meet the needs of American Indian communities. AIRC provides professional expertise to and on behalf of American Indian tribes, organizations, and schools, and other interested agencies in the following areas:

• Training and technical assistance in the areas of education, health, and social services
• Program development and evaluation
• Management analysis and assistance
• Experimental, historical, and survey research
• Video production
• Curriculum development

The programs and services that are currently offered:

• Four Directions – To provide an overall comprehensive approach to Career and College readiness for American Indians 5th-8th grade living in Cherokee County, Oklahoma within the Cherokee Nation Tribal Jurisdictional Area.
• NETSTAR – Native Educated Teacher Successfully Taught Academic Rigor are five education personnel training programs. Four were funded by the Office of Indian Education and one was funded by the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Approximately 117 Indian students have graduated with a Bachelor, Master, or Doctorate degree from these programs.
• Educational Talent Search – This program is currently in its 23rd year of service to students in 10 schools across northeastern Oklahoma. The program is funded to serve 737 junior and senior high school students.

Learn more about the American Indian Resource Center, Inc., and their vision that all American Indians have access to culturally appropriate resources for their needs.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.

When Camlyn Giddins was a senior in college, she was struggling with severe situational anxiety. She almost dropped out and wasn’t sure if she would make it to graduation, which made her panic. She was able to graduate and now works at Encircle, a nonprofit dedicated to building safe spaces for LGBTQ youth, young adults and families, while making sure LGBTQ youth don’t lose their “beautiful minds,” she said.

Giddins, a community engagement coordinator for Encircle, spoke at Intermountain Healthcare’s annual Mental Health Services Awareness Night, “Back to School-Back to Work,” at Utah Valley University on Thursday, during a session on the role of diversity and inclusion in mental health.

Suicide is a leading cause of death in Utah, and the state is consistently in the top 10 states in suicide deaths. A large portion of these deaths are youth, and LGTBQ youth are particularly at risk.

The presentation included research that shows that lesbian, gay and bisexual youth are three times more likely to report a lifetime suicide attempt than heterosexual youth, more than 40% have seriously considered suicide and 29% reported having attempted suicide in the past year. Giddins also shared that 40% of transgender adults reported having made a suicide attempt, almost all of them before age 25.

“Research is hard, because how many people are out? How many people are going to admit these things?” she said. “The sad thing is (these numbers) might be too low. I’m a teacher, so I’m thinking of my classroom, and I’m thinking of what is lost when 40% of them are gone? That affects the entire culture of our home, our school, our community.”

“There is nothing inherent to the sexual or gender minority brain or body that is predisposed to mental health issues,” she said. Rather, it’s the reactions people have to their identity and unwelcoming, hostile environments that increase their chance of mental illness, as well as their chance of engaging in risky behaviors like using illegal drugs.

Read more at KSL.com.