#shawleveryday2019 Day 21

Mental health impacts different communities in different ways. Broadly, the issues faced are similar, but they can manifest differently and approaches to treatment can vary a lot. 

Mental Health American has a lot of great statistics about mental health in the black and African American communities.

• Adult Black/African Americans are 20 percent more likely to report serious psychological distress than adult whites.
  
• Adult Black/African Americans living below poverty are three times more likely to report serious psychological distress than those living above poverty. 
  
• Black/African Americans of all ages are more likely to be victims of serious violent crime than are non-Hispanic whites, making them more likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
  
• Black/African Americans are twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.
  
• Black/African Americans hold beliefs related to stigma, psychological openness, and help-seeking, which in turn affects their coping behaviors. Generally speaking, the participants in this study were not very open to acknowledging psychological problems, but they were somewhat open to seek mental health services.

A study done in the UK recently offered these results:

• Personal and environmental factors included inability to recognise and accept mental health problems, positive impact of social networks, reluctance to discuss psychological distress and seek help among men, cultural identity, negative perception of and social stigma against mental health and financial factors.
• Factors affecting the relationship between service user and healthcare provider included the impact of long waiting times for initial assessment, language barriers, poor communication between service users and providers, inadequate recognition or response to mental health needs, imbalance of power and authority between service users and providers, cultural naivety, insensitivity and discrimination towards the needs of black and minority ethnic service users and lack of awareness of different services among service users and providers.
  

While I can only offer my personal experience as a white person, I hope that by talking about mental health, it encourages people of all backgrounds to be open and willing to talk about it as well.

#EndTheStigma
#shawleveryday2019
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