Publisher’s Note: Mental health concerns dominate people’s minds, even as the pandemic eases, according to a new survey conducted by the newsroom collaborative, Solving for Chicago.

Illinois Latino News is one of the 23 newsrooms working cooperatively to cover pressing issues facing the public in the Chicago region.

This story is based on your responses to the survey about the long-term effects of the pandemic people face and how to overcome those challenges.

Mental Health wellness was among the social problems you said you want to see more news coverage.

The impact of the coronavirus on Hispanics-Latinos, who have been disproportionately affected, has been discerning.

Due to higher rates of deaths, unemployment, college dropout, homelessness, and access to quality health care, the community is more prone to developing symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Systemic barriers to mental health support have worsened for the community — at a time when getting timely help has never been more critical.

Adding to the challenges, the community has been coping with a mental health care system that wasn’t built with them in mind. To adequately move forward in meeting the mental health needs of Hispanics-Latinos, beyond conventional structures and practices, thought leaders say it is critical to focus on culture. Although some aspects of culture contribute to stigmatized views of mental health, it might also be the solution.

“We were comfortable because we just put our heads down, and we’d keep going, and I think that’s what we’d been taught to do. Sigue, sigue, sigue, trabajando, sigue. Go, go, go, go, go, and when we look up again, we find ourselves in chaos because we haven’t looked up in so long.”

Mental health counselor and owner of Advocacy & Education Consulting Pamela Fullerton describes the mentality culturally ingrained into many Hispanics-Latinos: no matter what, keep working. As a result, conversations about self-care, work-life balance, and mental health are much less common, which comes at a price.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report found that only 34 percent of Hispanic-Latino adults with mental illness receive treatment every year.

As an essential worker who can work from home, Fullerton’s experience differed from those in public-facing industries, as she was less at-risk in terms of physical health. However, adjusting to staying home, running a business, teaching and caring for her two children, and assisting her clients through their new stressors, was challenging to balance.

“I did work with essential workers who had to go into work and so dealing with their anxiety of that, their stress about that. I’ve had clients that lost their jobs during the pandemic, and so a part of them kind of felt relief on the one hand, but then, on the other hand, a loss of income is a big deal, so I was helping many individuals find scholarship monies, grants, anything to kind of help them stay afloat,” she said. “I was doing that, which is very stressful knowing that I got a client who needs to get food on their table.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveys conducted in June 2020 show that overall, working adults reported symptoms of anxiety and depression during the pandemic. Still, numbers were higher for essential workers, with 42 percent saying they experienced these symptoms and 25 percent reporting they started or increased substance use to cope with their emotions.

In the February 2022 episode of ILLN Opinion+, NAMI Illinois Executive Director Andy Wade discussed the organization’s efforts to specifically target minority communities, who traditionally have stigmatized mental health views and who made up most of Chicago’s essential worker population.

Culture Influences How People Deal With Grief

These initiatives, Sharing Hope for the Black community and Compartiendo Esperanza for the Latinx community, consist of three videos that explore mental health from the lens of their respective community through dialogue and storytelling, followed by a guided discussion.

“This is only for them [the Black and Latinx communities] to talk about their community, to talk about their struggles, their challenges, and hopefully, in some cases, their success as well,” said Laura Martinez, Mental Health Equity & Inclusion Director of NAMI Illinois.

She says that culture influences people’s issues and how they cope with things like grief. For example, she recalled a recent event in which her neighbor’s husband died, and after praying, the mourning group began recanting old memories and crying.

“I took the opportunity to turn it into a Compartiendo Esperanza, and I said, you know, there’s this video, and I had my phone,” she explained. The specific video Martinez shared shows a grieving family, with the father explaining the need for him to be “macho” and not allow his children to see him cry.

It sparked a response from the men in the novena group.

“There were males there that said, ‘you know what, I want my children to know it’s not okay. We have a lot of mental health issues on my side of the family, and so I want them to know that if they’re not feeling okay, I want them to get the help that they need, right when they need it because he had lost someone to suicide. He said, ‘I don’t want to go through that again.’”

Fullerton says a significant disconnect between minorities and mental health dates back to its origin, which never considered other cultural experiences.

“If you think about psychology which is the root, psychology and psychiatry, they were started by white men. White, European men and white, older American men and they did all their work on white men and white, middle-class wives. What do they know about everybody else?” she said. “And have we seen mental health in other ethnic cultures? YES! Our indigenous ancestors did ancient healing practices, so mental health has been there; it just looks different than what we see here in the United States.”

She says that mental health providers continue to do a disservice to people of color by not implementing their customs into treatment. It may be a trial and error process to find one’s individualized and preferred method, but doing so creates trust and allows people to feel more comfortable opening up.

“That’s what I think is the beauty of mental health; it’s being in a partnership with the client that you’re working with, with the community that you’re working with, getting their input so that they’re comfortable with what you’re doing in the room because if not, they’re gonna do what so many Latinos, so many Black-Americans, what they’ve been doing for years which is coming to counseling for maybe one or two sessions and then leaving because they didn’t connect with the human being in front of them,” said Fullerton.

The lack of resources and services available for minorities was highlighted during the pandemic. However, many local organizations attempted to provide what people needed, whether food security, protective gear, or a sense of community.

Sin Titulo is a cultural and social justice-focused online apparel company founded by Iraís Elizarraraz and her sisters, Diana and Itzel, in August 2020. They opened with phrases like “first generation” and “you love the culture, now support the people” printed onto their t-shirts but have since expanded to hosting a mental health initiative, Fruits of My Labor, after Iraís was inspired by a panel she joined, where she answered questions about self-love and her identity.

“All these people of different backgrounds came up to me and said your story resonates with me so much, and I didn’t know; I thought my story was just a singular bubble, but it wasn’t,” she explained.

Sin Titulo’s mission focuses on uplifting Black and Brown people, but their recent Cinco de Mayo event was designed to elevate Mexican culture, voices, and experiences. Elizarraraz says that being teased by her family as a child by chanting “quiere llorar, quiere llorar” has led to her reluctance to publicly show emotion as an adult. But she couldn’t hold back at the event and noticed audience members also wiping tears away.

“I’m like, wow, people were crying at the event, and a lot of barriers were taken down after the discussion,” She continued. “Those moments I’m like wow, this is working, and it’s going in the right direction, but then also not only do we have to talk about it but how do we heal from it… we need to address it and make sure it doesn’t happen for generational trauma in the future.”

Fullerton points out that only talking about problems won’t be enough for individuals with more severe mental issues or who require medication. Still, narrative therapy, a type of counseling that focuses on a person’s story and treats them as the expert of their own lives, has proven effective for Latinx.

“We’re storytellers as Latinos, too, so I think it really speaks to the heart of who we are, using this type of therapy where we use stories to reauthor a new story that really is about who we are,” she said.

She says that informal settings such as NAMI’s Compartiendo Esperanza and Sin Titulo’s Fruits of My Labor also help ease Latinos with these sometimes severe discussions. She says that rather than calling them therapy groups, she and her patients call them “platicas,” where she approaches them as a friend looking to catch up.

“We’re just gonna sit here and talk and enjoy each other’s company. Let’s bring in coffee; let’s do a coffee cake. We love to eat, we love to drink, we love to talk, so bringing things in that culturally make us comfortable and that we’re familiar with will help to ease some of the anxiety that comes with thinking, ‘I’m working on my mental health,’ which is stigmatized or tabooed in our culture and other cultures as well,” she explained.

These differences in approaching mental health make a difference to groups who’ve been programmed to feel that only “crazy” people seek therapy. But, whether it’s addressed or not, mental health, like physical health, needs to be monitored to prevent crises.

“What I’m trying to do is take us to a point where we don’t only think about our mental health when we’re in chaos. But prior to all of those, when just trying to deal with the daily stressors of life…. That’s what mental health awareness is really all about. It’s preventative,” Fullerton said.

We want to hear from you!

Tell us what you think about this story. What you liked/didn’t like about it? Was it useful/not useful? What do you want to learn more about this topic? Email us at info@LatinoNewsNetwork.com

Also, The Solving for Chicago survey remains open for those who would like to share their own experiences with the Solving for Chicago collaborative: How has working through the pandemic changed your life?

The post Culture Is Key To Treating Mental Health Concerns  appeared first on ILLN.

Many Hispanics-Latinos view mental illness as a sign of weakness. Shying away from addressing mental illness for fear of being labeled “loco,� Spanish for “crazy,� only makes matters worse.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and in recognition of that observance, it was the subject of this month’s Latinx Talks (LT).

Hugo Balta, Publisher of Illinois Latino News (ILLN) and moderator for LT, led a panel discussion on the stigma associated with mental illness within the Hispanic-Latino culture.

Hispanic-Latino adolescents’ mental health and academic performance declined during the COVID-19 pandemic as parents’ job loss forced many teenagers’ to take over childcare responsibilities for their younger siblings and for others to get a job to help make ends meet.

Pamela Fullerton, a bilingual and bicultural Latina Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor and professor at Northeastern University, believes most schools do not have the resources to support students adequately.

“Schools, WAKE UP!” Fullerton said. “I was working for a school that had two social workers for the entire school. How are we going to serve our students with that lack of mental help support? We’re not.”

Spanish is the second-most spoken language in the United States, and the number of Hispanics-Latinos who speak Spanish at home has grown from 24.6 million in 2000 to 39.1 million in 2019, according to the Pew Research Center.

Still, between 2014 and 2019, the proportion of facilities offering mental health treatment in Spanish declined by nearly 18 percent, according to a study published last week in the journal Psychiatric Services.

Language is a clear barrier to seeking and delivering appropriate treatment among Hispanic-Latino. Language proficiency is especially important in psychiatric care because the determination of psychiatric diagnoses significantly depends on verbal communication between patients and professionals. 

“Hospitals are required to provide an interpreter for their patients,” said Laura Martinez, Mental Health Equity & Inclusion Director with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). The Joint Commission, the primary accrediting organization of U.S. hospitals, requires institutions to have a language services policy in place. “They also have to have signage throughout the hospital in the top five languages in their area.”

Omar Corro, Senior Director of Operations with Rincon Family Services, says language alone isn’t enough to serve the needs of the Hispanic-Latino community best. “Having that cultural humility is very important as well,” Corro said.

Hispanics-Latinos are not a monolith. With a seemingly endless range of subgroups and individual variations, culture is important because it bears upon what all people bring to the clinical setting. Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General finds It can account for minor variations in how people communicate their symptoms and which ones they report.

As Chicago, like many cities across the country, continue to crawl from the grip of COVID-19, much of the funding that was available at the height of the pandemic has decreased. Grassroots organizations, like Illinois Unidos, which have been on the frontline in helping Hispanics-Latinos through the crisis, fear that the communities who need the most help won’t get the resources they need.

“If they’re getting money, we want to see transparency,” said Dr. Pamela Vergara-Rodriguez, a triple boarded certified physician in psychiatry in the Cook County Health System, says transparency is paramount. “Where is that money going, and who is it serving?” Vergara-Rodriguez said that coalitions need to demand that local and state governments provide data and transparency in allocating resources to the public.

Latinx Talks is a monthly program produced by Imagen Marketing Consultants. The new Latino speakers series aims to bring to the forefront the inequities facing the Hispanic-Latino community.

Cover Photo: Illinois Department of Central Management Services

The post The Path Forward: Overcoming Mental Health Stigma in the Latino Community appeared first on ILLN.

The images that come to mind for most United States residents when thinking of Cinco de Mayo are of Mexican flags, sombreros, long mustaches, tequila and, in general, a vibe of celebration and partying. But, where did this celebration come from and how has it changed with the passage of time?

It was late morning of May 5, 1862, when the Mexican soldiers defending the city of Puebla saw the French army marching towards their position. These were dark days for the nation of Mexico. They had lost half their lands to the United States less than two decades ago, the crippling debt to European nations had impoverished the whole country, the division between conservatives and liberals could not get any deeper and now the French army had come to claim Mexico as their own.

These young and inexperienced Mexican soldiers would never have believed that some hours later they would be celebrating as the French army, the one that had at the start of the century started a war with all of Europe and nearly won, was retreating under heavy rain.

“Yes, we celebrate the victory of the Mexican army over the French army that invaded Mexico, it is known as the Battle of Puebla,â€� said Benjamín Villanueva García, a 43-year-old resident of Cancún, Mexico. “In Mexico it is more of a patriotic celebration, in the sense that a foreign invading army was defeated.â€�

The memory of this battle brings pride to most Mexicans. At the time, the idea of Mexico as a sovereign nation was constantly being challenged both by external and internal forces. And the victory at Puebla seemed like a reason to feel pride and hope; like the impossible was possible.

Juan Mora-Torres, an associate professor of Latin American History at DePaul University and author of the book “The Making of the Mexican Border,â€� told  The DePaulia what Cinco De Mayo means to him.

“Since its independence, [Mexico] had been a divided country, no sense of nationhood, all kinds of political conflicts and military conflicts among themselves,� he said. “They lost half the territory to the U.S. Things were not going well. Right? So [the Battle of Puebla] was like the first sense of something good happening since the independence.�.

Sadly, it was short-lived. France continued its campaign to take control of Mexico and ended up succeeding in installing Maximilian I as Emperor of Mexico. But the Battle of Puebla ended up becoming a powerful symbol for Mexicans living in the United States.

Mora-Torres suggests that the date is still remembered not necessarily because the victory had important implications at the time, but because it resonated with other struggles that Mexicans — and later the whole Latino community — were facing in the U.S. As the years passed, different generations of Latinos in the U.S. could see their own struggles against immensely strong forces as parallels to what happened in Puebla centuries ago.

“Every generation gets a different meaning from the Cinco de Mayo,� he said. “And in my case, the youth of my generation found value in that because that was the moment of the Civil Rights Movement.�

Delia Cosentino, acting chair of Latin American and Latino Studies and associate professor of History of Art and Architecture at DePaul University, had a similar view on the subject.

“For those who do know the history, it makes sense to want to celebrate a David and Goliath sort of fight in which the less powerful player wins the battle (i.e. Mexico vs. France),â€� Cosentino said. “It could be an analogy for marginalized communities in the U.S. feeling empowered in the face of Anglo political and social aggressions toward Latinos and Mexican Americans in particular.â€� 

“Any holiday that brings people of a shared heritage together can serve as a form of social glue, giving an emboldened sense of commonality,� she continued.

East Los Angeles, March 5, 1968. It started with the students at Garfield High School organizing a walkout and it ended up with thousands of Latino students walking out of their own schools all around the city. Not even the police were able to silence the Chicano movement that demanded to be listened to.

These students stood against structural racism in the government that stripped them of their rights and their identities, and against the day-to-day racism that kept them away from opportunities of a better life and from the respect they deserved. They hoped that one day they would beat the odds and wake up in a country that did not treat them as second-class citizens.

Today, Cinco de Mayo is celebrated in the United States with folkloric dances and Mariachis, with sombreros and fireworks, but especially copious amounts of beer and tequila. According to Nielsen, a data and market measurement firm, more than $735 million worth of beer and related malt beverages was bought in the U.S. in 2016’s Cinco de Mayo.

Mora-Torres explains when there’s money to be made, companies will take advantage. Margaritas, tequila, Mexican beers, nachos — all of these have become a part of the celebration of Cinco de Mayo. 

“You have to celebrate,� Mora-Torres said. “Now the celebration has taken over and the politics have been neglected, right? But every generation will find some value in the Cinco de Mayo.�

“In my generation, it was about civil rights,� Mora-Torres said. “And so, the young people got to find their agenda. And I think they will use the Cinco de Mayo as a metaphor, because it is an event that highlights the David against the Goliath struggle […] But I have no problem celebrating. Okay. It has been a very long winter. We have been two years with Covid.�

It is May of 2022, Chicago. While we go through a winter that does not want to end, I write this article in my room as the sun sets. As a Latino student in the U.S., I cannot keep my mind away from the current struggles: how there are still people being treated as illegal for making a hard decision to forge a better future for themselves, or how still the stereotypes around Latinos frame what we are expected to be capable of or how neighborhoods with a majority of Latino population are being neglected even in a city that prides itself of being liberal. In the end, I feel relief, because I know that the reason why David beats Goliath is because he never stops throwing stones.

Cover Graphic by La DePaulia multimedia assistant, Frankie Perez. 

Santiago Posada-Jaramillo is the Opinions Editor of La DePaulia. He enjoys politics, history, psychology, and video game design. He is from Colombia and new to the U.S. Santiago is a graduate student part of the MFA Game Design program at DePaul University. He decided to join La DePaulia because he believes that an informed community can make the world a better place. 

Email him at opinionesladepaulia@depauliaonline.com

Publisher’s Notes: You can read Santiago Posada-Jaramillo’s Spanish language version of Blood and Booze: The history of Cinco de Mayo by clicking on Sangre y alcohol: la historia del Cinco de Mayo.

Illinois Latino News (ILLN) and La DePaulia are partners in best serving the Hispanic-Latino community.

The post Blood and Booze: The history of Cinco de Mayo appeared first on ILLN.

“Cumpleaños feliz, te deseamos a ti,” our family sang “Happy Birthday,” to my wife, Adriana. “Cumpleaños felices,” we raised our voices as she celebrated another year with her new liver. Adriana had suffered from polycystic liver disease, a rare condition that causes cysts (fluid-filled sacs) to grow throughout the liver until the selflessness of a young woman saved her life.

Soon after the birth of our first child in 2003, my wife’s aggressive form of the disease became even more severe, deforming her organ further. A healthy liver has a smooth appearance weighing between three and three and a half pounds. Adriana’s polycystic liver looking like a cluster of large grapes, weighed just over 20 pounds when it was removed.

The enlarged liver displaced her other organs, complicating her overall health; Adriana would surely die without a transplant. Her medical miracle happened in her native Colombia. An organ donor, a woman who unfortunately died in an accident, was a match with Adriana.

In general, about 75 percent of people who undergo liver transplants live for at least five years, according to the Mayo Clinic That means that for every 100 people who receive a liver transplant for any reason, about 75 will live for five years and 25 will die within five years. Adriana celebrated 17 years with her new liver last November.

April is National Donate Life Month. Doctors and advocates say it’s more important than ever to bring attention to the need for organ donors. Approximately every 10 minutes, another person is added to the national waiting list.

I became an organ donor soon after Adriana’s liver transplant. Before then, I was like many Hispanics-Latinos, who are less likely to donate organs than Americans as a whole, according to organ donation experts. Hispanics-Latinos are disproportionately in need of donor organs and are less likely to consent to donation than their non-Hispanic counterparts, reports the National Library of Medicine.

“We have transformed the way that they’re thinking and looking at … organ transplantation,” said Dr. Juan Carlos Caicedo, organ transplant surgeon and the director of the Hispanic Transplant Program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. In an interview on WTTW’s Latino Voices, Dr. Caicedo told me that his team of 50 medical professionals at Northwestern Medicine’s Hispanic Transplant Program helps break down language and cultural barriers in the Hispanic-Latino community. “To be able to do it in their own language – knowing their culture, because our team is bilingual and bicultural — and removing all the language barriers and cultural barriers, we have been able to engage them in a positive way,” he said.

Last year, nephrologists at Loyola University Medical Center told Adriana that her kidneys, which suffer from polycystic kidney disease (PKD), were giving out. PKD is another inherited disorder in which clusters of cysts develop primarily within one’s kidneys, causing them to enlarge and lose function over time. As a result, Adriana is quickly reaching the point of needing dialysis. 

I quickly volunteered to be tested to see if I could be a living donor for my wife.

Transplant patients are often reluctant to consider an organ from their spouses because the organs may not be a good match in blood and tissue type. Poor matching can cause the recipient’s immune system to reject the organ.

But a report in the journal Dialysis and Transplantation found that kidney transplantation from spousal donors “has comparable outcomes to those of other living-unrelated donors, and shortens the time spent on the waiting list.�

Adriana is on that list, and the wait could be as long as three years. Happily, Adriana and I learned that I am a solid match to donate my kidney to her. We will have the surgery in June.

There are more than 100,000 people currently on the national transplant waiting list.

Current statistics show that Americans belonging to minority groups make up nearly 60 percent of those waiting for an organ transplant.  Although a transplant can be successful regardless of the race or ethnicity of the donor and recipient, there is a greater chance of longer-term survival for the recipient if the genetic background of the donor and recipient are closely matched.  

Please consider becoming an organ donor. Americans from every community are needed to help make a life-saving difference. Persons who register as organ donors can save up to eight lives and enhance the lives of 75 others.

Some of those donations can take place while you’re living. For example, living donors can give a lung, kidney, or part of their liver, which can almost regrow to its original size.

Next year, my family hopes to add a June birthday for Adriana, the first of many celebrating her new kidney, our family’s love, and the gift of life.

The post Organ Donation: A Birthday Story appeared first on ILLN.

City officials made the right decision by denying General Iron’s permit, but something is clearly wrong when it takes four excruciating years â€“ for everyone involved â€“ to settle a permit dispute. The fight was so intense that it even led to an intervention from federal agencies. Ultimately, it demonstrated the glaring flaws and systemic racism embedded in the permitting process for industry and the urgent need to reform zoning and land-use laws in Chicago. 

From the first day that we heard about the proposed move of General Iron from Lincoln Park to our neighborhood, Southeast Siders didn’t want a facility with a history of fires, explosions, and all the other problems that made residents of Lincoln Park call for it to be shut down for years. We knew that if this facility received a permit, it would be shredding entire cars down the street from George Washington High School for years to come.

As a lifelong Southeast Sider, I’ve lost count of the toxic industries that are allowed to open up shop near me. Every time a new one piles into the neighborhood, there is little transparency, community participation or accountability in the process. 

It seems that we are a sacrifice zone to polluters and that the city’s zoning laws are designed to keep us buried in industry. To Southeast Siders, these laws are not all that different from the redlining that cut deep race divisions between Chicago’s neighborhoods that maintained inequities for communities of color. 

The city’s history of segregation and racism has forced communities of color to suffer a lesser quality of life than wealthy white residents for decades. 

According to the CDPH’s Health Impact Assessment of RMG-General Iron, life expectancy for Southeast Side neighborhoods is two to nearly seven years shorter than in Lincoln Park. All three Southeast Side community areas rank in the bottom half of all Chicago’s community areas for life expectancy, cardiac and respiratory disease, and self-rated health, among other metrics. The CDPH has also identified these areas as having among the lowest child opportunities in the city, based on educational, health and environmental, and social and economic data. 

You can still see those divisions in the way that the city allows polluters to accumulate in communities of color while pouring resources into Whiter more affluent areas for different types of development. Similar clashes over industry amassing in communities of color are playing out in La Villita, Pilsen and McKinley Park. 

The solution is to make clear guidelines to the permitting process that are equitable, transparent, and leave plenty of room for genuine community participation. The health of residents should be the deciding factor, and the city must prevent industry from amassing in communities of color. 

No community should have to worry about breathing neurotoxins or being covered in dust saturated with heavy metals like lead and arsenic from the industries that brush up against houses and parks. The first line of defense for our health should be in the permitting process for new industries. 

If we had an equitable permitting process, the General Iron decision would not have taken as long as it did. The city could have taken into consideration the almost 250 industrial facilities that line the South Branch of the Chicago River and the existing monitors that register some of the highest levels of toxic metals like lead in the entire state. The city would have listened to the neighbors and heard our long list of concerns which would have led to the inevitable denial of this permit. 

Mayor Lightfoot promised to introduce an ordinance that would address cumulative impacts and make the permitting process more equitable. Environmental justice communities will hold the mayor to her promise for a long-overdue legislative fix to a system that isn’t working for anyone.

The Southeast Side was essential in making Chicago and the region what it is today, and it’s still an essential part of the city where the people who live here can decide what our community should look like. We can be an important part of planning and building a healthier Southeast Side whose prosperity will open up new possibilities for our city. 

Gina Ramirez works to further sustainable land use and zoning rules that can provide crucial protections to areas of Chicago, like the Southeast Side, that are burdened with cumulative industrial pollution. Ramirez is an active member of the Coalition to Ban Petcoke and the Southeast Environmental Taskforce. She has a MA focused in sociology from Roosevelt University and BA in communications from DePaul University.

Publisher’s Note: Do you have something to say? We’re interested. Submit ideas for Opinion-Editorial essays and/or finished work to Info@LatinoNewsNetwork.com

The post Reform Racist Permit Process In OrderTo Build A Healthier Southeast Side appeared first on ILLN.