Addressing how cultural barriers to mental healthcare use can be overcome, Dr. Kim noted that “in practice, we need to have a two-pronged approach to address disparities in mental health for minority groups.” In many cases, we have seen victim blaming where their cultures and lack of knowledge of the patients are discussed as the major barriers to mental health services. Health literacy, which refers to the ability to obtain basic information about medical conditions and utilize it to seek the necessary care, may also contribute to disparities in mental healthcare access. Stereotypes such as the model minority myth, often ascribed to Asian Americans, can adversely impact whether or not individuals access mental healthcare. “Many participants gave examples of how their values, philosophies, or spirituality were dismissed in the assessment stage of accessing mental healthcare, resulting in them being told they don’t need or qualify for treatment.

Sexual and Gender Minority Groups: Stigma Experienced Within Mental Health Services

Patients and providers uniformly report high levels of satisfaction with videoconferencing, and there is good evidence for the clinical equivalency of psychiatric and psychological treatments delivered via videoconferencing, compared with face-to-face delivery (78). It involves an offsite team of mental health specialists collaborating with onsite PCPs from a centralized location, using telephones, videoconferencing, and electronic health records. The potential role of technology to reach unmet mental health needs is increasingly recognized by patients, practitioners, and researchers. For instance, MHFA is an early intervention training program to raise awareness of mental issues, mitigate stigma, and promote appropriate treatment seeking. This reinforces the interplay among mental health, interpersonal relationships, and social determinants of health and promotes mental health and social equity (43). Even in high-income countries, the shortage of mental health specialists demands a task-sharing approach.

What are the Possible Cultural Factors that Contribute to Misdiagnosis?

Evidence-based solutions must respond to the different and unique experiences among people of all races. The responsibility should not rest solely on parents and caretakers, much less young people themselves. The youths’ multiple identities need to be considered when seeking solutions.

• Importantly, similar to community programming, the groups are constructed to be developmentally appropriate.
• For both internalizing and externalizing problems, the quadratic interactions among ethnicity were not significant, and were excluded from the models for the sake of parsimony.
• For white women, the risk of having an incarcerated family member is only one quarter as high, at 12%, as opposed to nearly 50% (46, 47).
• This systematic review synthesizes recent evidence on barriers and facilitators of mental health service use among racial/ethnic minority adolescents in the U.S.
• A podcast discussing Black mental health, wellness, and emotional resilience, featuring personal stories and expert insights.
• Mental health support must have an anti-oppressive and social justice approach in which LGBTQ+ ​youth can learn to understand, cope with, and reject heteronormativity, for example, through CBT psycho-education or peer-support groups.

Talking to Youth about Anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander Hate

Community systems of care promote a flexible and individualized approach to service delivery for the child and family within the context of his/her home and community as an alternative to treatment in out-of-home settings, while attending to family and systems issues that impact such care. However, there is a great deal to be done in both increasing the diversity of the children’s mental health workforce and the training of all children’s mental health professionals on delivering culturally competent services. Additionally, antidepressants and antipsychotics are much more frequently prescribed to children and adolescents in the US as compared to most other industrialized countries.72 However, despite the prevalent use of psychotropic prescription drugs in children and adolescents in this country, there continues to be concern that there are differences in prescription psychotropic drug use based on race and ethnicity. However, they were able to identify probably efficacious treatments for ethnic minority youth with anxiety-related problems, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, conduct problems, substance use problems, trauma-related syndromes, and other clinical problems.

Factors like systemic racism, insufficient insurance coverage, and a lack of access to culturally competent providers can make SAFE Project Latinx mental health resources it harder to seek help. This awareness is important to increase representation, but more is needed to address these disparities. By 2044, it’s estimated that over half of Americans will belong to a minority group. And systemic injustice continues to harm those who need the most support. Factors like cultural stigma, systemic racism, and a lack of awareness have negatively affected mental health in these communities for a very long time.