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Michaela Bourgeois, Emily Burris, and Ken Boddie
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – July marks National Minority Mental Health Month — bringing awareness to the unique struggles facing racial and ethnic minorities in the United States.
Reverend Markel Hutchins, President and CEO of Movement Forward — a civil rights organization supporting social justice issues, economic parity and educational equality — says economic and sociological factors play a role in mental health treatment disparities among minority communities.
Hutchins points out that African American communities lag behind in access to mental health care in addition to willingness to receive health care treatment. He also says access to health care coverage plays a role.
“One of those factors is certainly access. Minorities don’t have the same kind of health care coverage that other Americans, particularly white Americans, have,” Hutchins said.
“I think it’s a matter of economics,” Hutchins added. “Data shows that African Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities don’t have the same level of income, the level of access to the quality of economics that the majority of white Americans have.”
According to Hutchins, sociological and psychological factors play a role in the lack of health care access, including stigma around receiving mental health care.
“People of color have, unfortunately, dealt with for many decades the stigma that somehow, you’re weak or not as strong as others if you have to seek mental health support and mental health treatment,” Hutchins said.
There’s also a need for mental health professionals who can help treat minority communities and have an understanding of the community’s unique mental health challenges.
“There’s probably a significant deficit of sensitivity to the particularities of the conditions that African Americans and Hispanics and other minorities face in America. There’s no race of people in the history of our country who have been as disenfranchised and depressed and oppressed as African Americans,” Hutchins said.
“The trauma that Black Americans face is unique, and it takes a unique kind of mental health professional to understand the dynamics, that understand the history and then be able to diagnose and effectively treat people particularly in the African American community,” Hutchins added.
Hutchins says having open discussions through platforms such as social media or Movement Forward can help lessen shame and stigma around mental health treatment.
“It will not happen until everyday citizens, everyday communities have these conversations and not just in minority communities, all of us should be having conversations at our dinner table, at out breakfast table about how important it is to maintain a healthy mind, a healthy psychosis, a healthy mentality because only when we do so, we’ll see a decline in some of the mental health challenges that we’ve seen over the last several decades.”
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