Minority Mental Health Disparities: What’s Going On?

Last week, in observation of National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, we looked at a few statistics relating to minority mental health and came up some patterns regarding those statistics. In this week’s post, I’ll provide my thoughts on why these statistics exist and how I believe we can reduce mental health disparities among minorities.

The first pattern we observed is that minorities, especially men, are less likely to seek and receive help for their mental health struggles. The stigma around mental health issues among minority communities is likely the main cause for this. Where does this stigma come from? In my opinion, it comes from ignorance of the origin of mental health issues. Minority communities are oftentimes taught to think that mental health issues are not biological but rather behavioral. This means that they are taught to believe that a person with depression is weak and choosing to struggle, rather than that the person has a chemical imbalance within their body that does not allow them to behave ‘normally’. A belief that the cause of mental health issues is behavioral and not biological leads to the belief that the solution lies within yourself and cannot be helped by a mental health professional. So, when a person is mentally ill, the apparently logical solution is to bully them, ignore them, or just hope that they will ‘come to their senses’. This is one reason, among many others, why minorities fail to seek help.

The next pattern we observed is that a person’s financial status has an inverse effect on their mental well-being. A likely explanation to this is that typically, but not always, financial status is directly related to education level. The more education you have, the wealthier you are. This is obviously not always the case, but is generally somewhat true. That being said, knowledge (which doesn’t always relate directly to education, but let’s say that it generally does for purposes of this post) prevents the ignorance regarding origins of mental health issues described above. It also provides people with access to resources that aren’t available to less financially fortunate minorities. Both these outcomes lead to a reluctance to seek help. Another reason for this is that less financial privilege typically involves less stability and more stress, which affects mental well-being in a negative way.

How can we improve outcomes for minorities to ensure that such statistics slowly but surely become obsolete? The obvious solution to this problem is education. It is the responsibility of those with knowledge to help share that knowledge to those without. Doing so will lead to better outcomes not only for minority populations but also to all of the people that minority populations interact with on a daily basis. Education will lessen the stigma around mental illness. It will provide individuals with information about accessible resources. It will improve their ability to get jobs and therefore achieve financial freedom, thereby reducing stress. So, obviously education is the solution but how exactly can we implement improving education among a large group of people? I wish I did, but I surely don’t have a perfect answer to this question. Think about it!