Mental Health Resources for Culturally Diverse Communities

In 2018, LA Public Health presented the stats on depression (not including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, anxiety, and other chronic mental illnesses): - 1,200,000 persons are living with depression in LA - 50% of those are from culturally diverse communities and may need help in language support - SGV has180,000 persons alone and 3rd highest in LA LA is struggling to provide adequate mental health care, especially within our culturally diverse communities. IT MAKES a difference CULTURALLY in understanding the narratives of mental health conditions, describes symptoms, communicates, receives and responds to treatments.

By following the example of LA County’s governmental departments (DMV & Dept. of Public Services) that offers 10 threshold languages +, We will bridge the gap in offering free resources who seek mental health care in multiple language options. The funding will pay for translation services and a budget for meeting virtually or in-person, once available. NAMI SGV’s trained and culturally diverse facilitators (volunteers) will lead: 1/ Basics 2/ Family to Family 3/ Peer to Peer Outreach program such as In Your Own Voice and new programs, + Presently, there is not enough organizations that continuously offer free of charge multiple language mental health programs led by trained and culturally diverse facilitators.

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

Offering culturally diverse communities will help bring everyone together in the multi-generational families where the younger generations may need English language while the parents and grand parents prefer their preferred languages. A person just doesn’t have mental illness, a family does, a community does. When an entire household can learn, grown, and live better together, it will make an impact in the family’s lives. No matter which language barriers, our programs are to serve everyone in the family and community.

According to the census.gov of 2019, LA county has: 1/ 10 million + peoples with 5 million identify as people of color 2/ 56.6% of population speak a 2nd language other than English There is a lack of services available free of charge that can help both support peoples and the governmental department such as LA Public Health and LA Dept of Mental Health. We can track and improve on what the LA Public Health's data has as of 2018 on Depression for example. This is both an existing effort and a new initiative. Our new initiatives are revisions of existing programs already presented in Spanish and Chinese as well as new language translations.