Cenpatico Integrated Care, a mental health company in Southern Arizona, has made serious policy changes that affects patients it was suppose to serve.
Zuher Belal put a black pencil on the rectangular piece of paper stretched out on a table. The 21-year-old native of Syria drew a Muslim man with arms outstretched in prayer. Then, he drew an airplane dropping a bomb.
“Perhaps the biggest deficit in our clients’ lives is a lack of two things – it’s a lack of community and it’s a lack of self-esteem,” says Rob Gitin, who works with vulnerable youth in San Francisco.
“The word we use for mental illness in Vietnamese is ‘crazy,’” Lanie Tran said. “If you’re a Buddhist, you believe you or your family members did something wrong in a previous birth. If you’re Catholic, you believe God is punishing you for something you did that was mean or wrong.”
“We wanted to see the sun because the lights were on inside all the time. They would wake us up all the time, they wouldn’t let us sleep,” said one unaccompanied minor placed in a Texas detention center. “I wanted to cry. I thought, ‘God why am I here. Why did I come?’”
Young people are suffering from mental health problems in unprecedented numbers — it's a problem that deserves a dedicated, thorough and sensitive investigation, says journalist Gisela Telis.
Why is mental health so walled off from the rest of the health care system, even when statistics show that 18 percent of all adults have some kind of mental illness? And weren't federal parity requirements supposed to fix this?
Mental illness has been a trending topic in the news. While we often see stories about it, not much attention is given to how the Latino community is faring. A 2016 California Fellow sets out to change that with a series on stigma and mental health needs in Southern California communities.
In ethnic minority communities in particular, mental illness is a serious problem since stigma too often prevents individuals from seeking and getting the help they need. But a handful of programs are making progress in overcoming these obstacles.
The Yurok, California’s largest Native American tribe, recently submitted an emergency declaration to Gov. Jerry Brown and the federal government in response to a rash of suicides among the tribe’s young men. What's driving this trend, and what can be done?
