BIPOC Mental Health Month Week 3

Stephanie Weatherly, DNP, PMH RN-BC, FACHE

Chief Clinical Officer

July 12, 2021

This week’s blog contains some amazing resources for enacting true change. Let’s challenge each other to take one actionable step this week to reduce mental health care disparity for persons of color. This week we will look at mental health disparity for Asian Americans.

According to the US HHS Office of Minority Health:

Mental and Behavioral Health - Asian Americans

• Suicide was the leading cause of death for Asian/Pacific Islanders, ages 15 to 24, in 2019.
• Asian American males in grades 9-12 were 30 percent more likely to consider attempting suicide than non-Hispanic white male students in 2019.
• In 2018, Asians were 60 percent less likely to have received mental health treatment than non-Hispanic whites.
• Southeast Asian refugees are at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) associated with trauma experienced before and after immigration to the U.S.
• One study found that 70 percent of Southeast Asian refugees receiving mental health care were diagnosed with PTSD.
• The overall suicide rate for Asians is less than half that of the non-Hispanic white population.

Achieving equity in healthcare can feel overwhelming. The Office of Minority Health has an amazing resource for creating equity in behavioral health delivery: Behavioral Health Implementation Guide for the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care (Behavioral Health Guide). This guide, report, and toolkit are filled with action steps that we can take to change the landscape we are currently working in.

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

Advocating for Change

Write, call or talk to legislators — both local and federal — to support efforts to:

• Improve access to and the quality of mental health services for underserved people.
• Ensure providers are trained on cultural competence.
• Make linguistic services (interpretation and translation) available in treatment settings.
• Provide holistic mental health services and offer many care modalities (including trauma-informed care, psychiatry, psychology, faith-based care, community-based care, and low-cost alternatives to care).  

Thank you for all you are doing to enact change!