BIPOC Mental Health Month 2022 Kick-Off

Stephanie Weatherly, DNP, PMH RN-BC, FACHE

Chief Clinical Officer

July 5, 2022

This week kicks off Black, Indigenous, Persons of Color (BIPOC) Mental Health Month. What has your program planned for this week to raise awareness of mental health disparity? As mental health advocates, we need to create actionable steps to raise awareness and reduce the chasm of care experienced by persons of color.

This week let's start by looking at some statistics for Black or African Americans:

• In 2019, death by suicide was the second leading cause of death for blacks or African Americans ages 15 to 24.1.
• The death rate from suicide for black or African American men was four times greater than for African American women in 2018.
• The suicide rate for black or African Americans was 60 percent lower than that of the non-Hispanic white population in 2018.
• Black females, grades 9-12, were 60 percent more likely to attempt suicide in 2019 than non-Hispanic white females of the same age.
• Poverty level affects mental health status. Black or African Americans living below the poverty level are twice as likely to report serious psychological distress compared to those over twice the poverty level.
• A report from the U.S. Surgeon General found that from 1980 - 1995, the suicide rate among African Americans ages 10 to 14 increased by 233 percent, compared to 120 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

In addition to these statistics, this week's news is spotlighting the community trauma experienced in the face of racial inequities. According to Mental Health America, racial trauma, or race-based traumatic stress (RBTS), refers to the mental and emotional injury caused by encounters with racial bias and ethnic discrimination, racism, and hate crimes. Any individual that has experienced an emotionally painful, sudden, and uncontrollable racist encounter is at risk of suffering from a race-based traumatic stress injury.

Here are some examples of individual and systemic racism:

Examples of Individual Racism:

• Following the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., there were nearly 1,500 reported incidents of anti-Asian racism in just one month. Reports included physical and verbal attacks and reports of anti-Asian discrimination in private businesses.
• In 2018, 38 percent of Latinx people were verbally attacked for speaking Spanish, were told to "go back to their countries," called a racial slur, and/or treated unfairly by others.
• Over the course of one year, Twitter saw 4.2 million anti-Semitic tweets in just the English language alone. These tweets included anti-Semitic stereotypes, promoting anti-Semitic personality or media, symbols, slurs, or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial.

Examples of Systemic Racism:

• Black people make up 12 percent of the country's population but make up around 33 percent of the total prison population. This overrepresentation reflects racist arrests and policing as well as racist sentencing practices in the criminal justice system. 
• Previous and current racial displacement, exclusion, and segregation policies have left all BIPOC less likely than whites to own their homes regardless of their level of education, income, location, marital status, and age.
• The erasure of Asian Pacific Islanders (APIs) in the "Asian or Pacific Islander" category by U.S. Census data severely restricts access to opportunities in these communities by concealing the unique barriers faced by APIs that are not faced by East or South Asian communities. 
• Historical occupation segregation has made Black people less likely than Whites to hold jobs offering retirement savings prioritized by the U.S. tax code. This helps create a persistent wealth gap between White and Black communities where the median savings of blacks are, on average, just 21.4 percent of the median savings of whites.
• Lack of cultural competency in therapy training, financial incentives, and geographical isolation have created barriers to providing appropriate mental health resources in Native American communities. Rates of suicide in these communities are 3.5x higher than in racial/ethnic groups with the lowest rates of suicide.

As healthcare providers and mental health advocates, how can we help? Here is a resource to learn more and learn ways to work toward ending mental health care disparity.