BIPOC Mental Health Month Week 2

Stephanie Weatherly, DNP, PMH RN-BC, FACHE

Chief Clinical Officer

July 5, 2021

Today begins our first full week of BIPOC Mental Health Month. What has your team 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 Hispanic Americans.  

According to the US HHS Office of Minority Health:

Mental and Behavioral Health – Hispanic Americans

• The death rate from suicide for Hispanic men was four times the rate for Hispanic women in 2018.
• However, the suicide rate for Hispanics is less than half that of the non-Hispanic white population.
• In 2019, suicide was the second leading cause of death for Hispanics, ages 15 to 34.
• Suicide attempts for Hispanic girls, grades 9-12, were 30 percent higher than for non-Hispanic white girls in the same age group in 2019.
• In 2018, Hispanics were 50 percent less likely to have received mental health treatment than non-Hispanic whites.
• Poverty level affects mental health status. Hispanics living below the poverty level are twice as likely to report serious psychological distress compared to Hispanics over twice the poverty level.

If you would like to understand better the complexities of mental health disparity and how the cultural influence of both patient and provider have influenced mental health care today, I would highly recommend watching this recent training done by The National Institute for Mental Health. Dr. Lewis-Fernández presented Addressing Ethnoracial Disparities in Mental Health Risk, Assessment, and Service Delivery last month. He is a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and director of the New York State Center of Excellence for Cultural Competence and the Hispanic Treatment Program, and co-director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic, at New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI). It is time well spent to watch this training!

If you are an APNA member, they offer a free CEU course for July titled: I'm Not Crazy! Destigmatizing Schizophrenia in the African American Community | Empirical Validation of the Racial/Ethnic/Cultural Sensitivity Scale. It is also a very good presentation as well.

What can we do to help reduce these disparities? (according to NAMI):

Providing Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Care

• Follow the Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services Standards developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 
• Provide equitable and respectful quality care and services inclusive of the cultural health beliefs and practices of the community you serve.
• Offer free language assistance and other needed assistance to individuals with limited English proficiency.
• Hire diverse, bilingual staff that is representative of the community served.

Looking forward to hearing about the steps you are taking in the coming weeks!