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July is National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. This July, communities are facing the “perfect storm” of crises that are deepening the disparities in mental health and wellbeing. The current COVID-19 pandemic, economic crisis, behavioral health crisis, and the civil unrest stemming from recent incidents of police brutality has impacted all of America, but disproportionately affects communities of color.

Community and faith-based organizations play an essential role in helping these communities handle deeply experienced trauma, loss, and grief. Poor access to and mistrust of health care systems leads individuals to reach out to their familiar and trusted faith-based organizations and leaders. In many cultures, spirituality is a key driver of wellbeing and hope. Beyond this, faith-based entities have also been reliable providers of social services and emotional supports, and the coordinators of a wide array of health-related services and public health campaigns. Well-established and new models of faith-based partnerships are continuing to augment the limited behavioral health workforce in these communities. Faith leaders are coming together across communities to organize, support, provide, engage and instill hope.

Join this NNED virtual roundtable hosted by the NNED National Facilitation Center and SAMHSA’s Office of Behavioral Health Equity, in partnership with SAMHSA’s Mental Health Technology Transfer Center Network Coordinating Office. Learn how faith-based NNED partner organizations are supporting the mental health concerns of racial/ethnic minorities and providing opportunities to receive support and connection through faith-based practices and partnerships.

This NNED virtual roundtable will highlight:

• Faith-based partnerships that address the behavioral health in communities of color and augment the behavioral health workforce;
• Cultural and spiritual practices provided by faith-based organizations to strengthen community and social connectedness during times of crises;
• Faith leaders’ strategies to help diverse communities cope with trauma, loss, and grief; and
• The importance of and role of faith leaders in promoting self-care among the health care workforce, caregivers, and themselves.

NOTE: Due to the substantial interest in this Virtual Roundtable, the number of attendees able to join live may be limited by the platform. We strongly encourage you to join the Virtual Roundtable early to secure a spot. A recording will be sent to all who register. 

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Panelists

Rev. Dr. Charles Butler

Clarence Yarholar

Dr. Farha Abbasi

María del Carmen Uceda-Gras

Rev. Pausa Kaio “PK” Thompson

Dr. Sidney Hankerson

In early March, just before California put out a stay-at-home order, writer and educator Rachelle Cruz’s parents were taking the BART train back to their home in Hayward in the San Francisco Bay area after a long day at work in the city.

The couple owns a small remittance business with a largely Filipino and migrant clientele who send a portion of their wages back to their home countries. To protect themselves from the growing threat of COVID-19, the couple were wearing masks. It drew attention.

“All of a sudden another passenger yelled at them, telling them to go back to their country,” Cruz told HuffPost. “The person called my Filipino mother a ‘Chinese Coronavirus b****’ and said that both of my parents are ‘bearers of the virus.’”

They stopped taking the BART train last week, a day shy of the lockdown in San Francisco. When Cruz asked her mother if it was OK that she shared the story with HuffPost, she agreed with one request.

“My mother wanted to clarify that this was the third racist incident she’s personally experienced or witnessed on the train in the last few weeks,” Cruz said. “My parents are now working from home, where my mother misses her clients, but not the racists on the train.”

Encounters like those experienced by Cruz’s parents have become commonplace for Asian Americans in the wake of the current global public health emergency.

Because COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China, Asian Americans have been widely scapegoated, regardless of whether they’re Chinese or not. (Asian Americans ― Indonesians, Chinese, Koreans, Thai, Filipinos, and others ― aren’t a monolith, but for Americans with bigoted views, that hardly matters.)

Asian Americans of every descent are dealing not only with the virus itself, but verbal and physical violence from xenophobic neighbors. The choice to wear a mask or not is widely debated among friends and relatives ― do you wear one to protect yourself from the virus or does it draw unnecessary attention?

“Don’t be afraid to be direct. You can say something like: ‘With all the racism against Asians lately, I was wondering if anyone has treated you differently?’ Just listen and support them,” she said. “And please, don’t minimize their experience.”

Read more on HuffPost.com.

Dr. Biko A. Sankofa, a developmental psychologist and a founding partner of Vital TMS Therapy for Depression in Washington, D.C., recalls being in graduate school with 15 female classmates who worried that their options for life partners would narrow the longer they stayed in school. Earning more degrees meant having less time to marry and start a family. That alone, Sankofa says, was a trigger for anxiety and, sometimes, depression.

“My female colleagues were afraid that they’d be alone — that they wouldn’t find a partner of equal academic status,” he says. “While African American women are getting academic achievements at a higher rate than [African American] men, they feel like they end up having fewer options, which could lead to some degree of loneliness.”

Loneliness, he clarified, can have little to do with being in physical proximity to someone. But research suggests that for African American women, it can lead to much larger issues.

The findings revealed in ”Treating Depression, Anxiety, and Stress in Ethnic and Racial Groups” were the culmination of a five-year study of 168 African American college students at the University of Michigan. There’s little research done on the intersection of mental health, gender and race, explains the report’s author, Dr. Edward C. Chang. “There is the growing appreciation that African American women are basically a double minority,” he says. “Not only are they female, but they are African American, which means they navigate multiple and complex challenges.”

However, Chang warns against falling into stereotypical narratives about Black women’s lives. “African American females don’t often go about telling the world, ‘Hey, I’m very lonely’ and express feelings of depression and anxiety,” he says — which means there are decades of data on Black women’s mental health that may not be very accurate. Only about a quarter of America’s Black population seeks mental health care, compared to 40 percent of White Americans, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“We’ve got to have mechanisms by which African American females can pursue and obtain resources where they feel comfortable enough to be able to talk about these things so they can leverage their challenges within the group [and] in a larger society.”

Read more on Ozy.com.

A new study from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) reports that the highest rate of COVID-19 positive cases in several U.S. states, including Hawaiʻi, are among Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI) more than other racial and ethnic groups.

The research showed as high as 217.7 cases per 100,000 in NHPI residents in at least five states—Hawaiʻi, California, Oregon, Utah and Washington. The rates of COVID-19 positive cases within these states are greater than those reported for African Americans and American Indians, two racial/ethnic groups that have been receiving much of the national attention regarding COVID-19 risk.

Indigenous peoples share similar concerns that put them at an increased risk for COVID-19 and other related problems. These include limited access to healthcare services, more chronic and infectious diseases and poorer economic and living conditions.

“These are all long-standing health concerns for indigenous people that predate the arrival of COVID-19, but they are even more concerning now,” said Keaweʻaimoku Kaholokula, professor and chair of JABSOM’s Department of Native Hawaiian Health, who has been tracking and analyzing the data.

According to Kaholokula, the higher risk of infection among NHPI is linked to preexisting and underlying inequities in the social determinants of health across racial and ethnic groups that are ubiquitous in the U.S.

Kaholokula said, “Despite the higher COVID-19 risk among NHPI, it is important to remember and recognize the resiliency and fortitude of NHPI, communities and their cultural assets that can be leveraged to reduce the adverse impact of COVID-19. NHPI communities continue to flourish while maintaining their unique cultural values, perspectives, practices and aspirations.”

Read more on Hawaii.edu.

Despite efforts to better educate veterans on the availability of mental health services, the rate at which former service men and women die by suicide continues to climb, according to the latest statistics available from U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. While the number of American veterans has decreased, the number of suicides has stayed pretty much the same.

Pflugerville veteran Denny Katona enlisted in the Pennsylvania National Guard in 1993; roughly 10 years later he joined the Army and deployed to Iraq.

“During my last deployment I was in charge of the local national interpreters, and one of my interpreters – she was a 19-year-old Syrian-Christian girl – she went out on a mission. They got hit with an IED and I had to identify the body,” recalled Katona.

That experience would haunt Katona for years – the smell of burning hair and flesh. He returned from active-duty in 2012, but said he wouldn’t end up seeking out help, and eventually be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, until three years after his return.

In 2016, Katona got the idea to form the group “O.P. Veteran.” The “O.P.” standing for observation post which lends itself to the organization’s main mission – connecting veterans with other veterans to make sure they’re watching out for each other.

“When we’re going through that and we’re at that point, one of the biggest feelings that we have is, ‘I’m all alone, nobody feels the way I feel,’” said Katona. “By showing veterans that they are connected to others that have undergone the same trials and ordeals and have overcome that – I think that shows the encouragement folks need in order to start getting the help that they need.”

Read more on SpectrumLocalNews.com.

Mental health experts are scratching their heads about African-American teen suicides, a phenomenon two researchers say is “skyrocketing” across the United States in a study that shows drastic increases in attempts and deaths since 2001.

“We’ve known for a long time that adolescent males have a higher suicide rate than females,” said University of Toledo professor emeritus James Price, one of two authors of The Changing Characteristics of African-American Adolescent Suicides, 2001 – 2017 — a report released last month detailing an upward trend of suicide deaths and attempts among blacks aged 13 to 19 throughout a 16-year period.

“What’s going on is we’re seeing an increase in African-American females. Males used to be five times more likely to commit suicide, now they’re about three times,” he said. “There’s been a narrowing of the gap.”

Mr. Price and Jagdish Khubchandani, a health science professor at Ball State concluded that the rate of African-American suicides from adolescent females rose by 182 percent over the time period, while the rate for males jumped by 60 percent. In that same time period, there were 1,375 black male teen suicides and 377 female teen suicides across the United States, catapulting suicide to become the second leading cause of death among African-American adolescents behind homicides.

Suicide attempts serious enough that the individual needed medical attention also skyrocketed. African-American adolescent females attempted 94,760 suicides over that period, while males made 68,528 attempts. For males, 52 percent of all suicides involved a firearm, while 56 percent of females hanged themselves or suffocated.

Mr. Price and Mr. Khubchandani contend that one of the biggest problems facing black teens who are suicidal is a prevalence of guns in households. Mr. Price conducted a 1994 study titled “African-American adults’ perceptions of guns and violence” revealed that only 14 percent of African-Americans in the study believed that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of suicide.

If you or some one you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-(800) 273-8255 (TALK).

Read more on TheBlade.com.