Overcoming barriers: Improving mental health for all Virginians
The Daily ProgressAug 13, 2017
While the conversation sur-rounding mental health has garnered more attention in recent years, the specific health needs of people of color have rarely been talked about at the state level. Despite having lower rates of mental illness than white Americans, people of color, particularly black and Latinx populations, have less access to mental health care and blacks experience worse outcomes from treatment than do whites. Although the factors leading to these discrepancies are deeply rooted, there are steps we can take at the state level to close the gap.
A primary reason for poorer mental health outcomes among black and Latinx Americans is a lack access to designated mental health services, which places general practitioners and emergency services as the first step in treatment, rather than mental health specialists.
For people of color, scarcity of health care providers who reflect a similar racial or ethnic identity can create a trust gap.
And this is sometimes made more challenging by language barriers.
These cultural barriers have led to black and Latinx communities relying much more heavily on community leaders such as pastors for help with mental health care. Although community leaders can certainly be useful as a supplement to care, they may lack the training and experience of certified health care providers.
As we've seen in the past in
During the past legislative session,
The lack of access to mental health care can be addressed by improving the ability of Virginians of color to afford mental health care and increasing the number of practitioners who are people of color.
Expanding access to coverage through amechanism such as Medicaid expansion would have an out sized impact on communities of color and in turn could reduce utilization of emergency room and general practitioners for mental health conditions that could be more efficiently treated by a specialist.
An organized effort to create a pipeline from historically black colleges and universities would grow the number of mental health practitioners. This in turn could create more trust between communities of color and mental health care providers. Other industries have worked deliberately to increase people of color in specific occupations; the education field is a good example in
State policymakers seeking to improve access to care for Virginians of color have a ready mechanism at hand.
These recommendations - such as increasing access to same-day care, crisis services, and outpatient mental health care - are vital to improving health outcomes, and additional work should be done to identify and recommend ways to close
Adequately funding the efforts will also be critical - the estimated cost of implementing all of the subcommittee's recommendations would total
The state has a role to play in closing racial outcome and access gaps when it comes to mental health care. There should be concerted efforts to improve access, train providers in cultural competency, and create a pipeline of diverse mental health practitioners, within a framework of a plan to reduce disparities by race. With few market incentives for these changes to occur naturally, it is incumbent upon us and our legislators to put these changes in motion.