August 14, 2024
Initiative-funded project seeks to bridge mental health care gap for the local Somali community
If there is one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light, it is that mental health conditions have and continue to be highly prevalent yet significantly undertreated within healthcare settings across the U.S. While the number of adults who received mental health treatment increased from 2019-2021, non-Hispanic White adults continue to be the most likely to receive any mental health treatment compared to Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic Asian individuals. This disparity reflects a greater systemic exclusion of people of color in receiving equal access to mental health care, with barriers like lack of bilingual and bicultural providers, poor access to care in rural and other geographic areas, limited mental health literacy, lack of insurance coverage and stigma due to history of racism and mistrust.
In autumn 2023, Neighborhood House (NH) and University of Washington’s Health Promotion Research Center (HPRC) received a Tier 1 Population Health Initiative pilot grant to research how to mitigate the negative impact of cultural and societal restraints faced by the Somali community in receiving adequate mental health care in King County. By utilizing anti-racist implementation science, the project seeks to culturally adapt effective mental health resources while reducing the barriers towards equitable healthcare by providing services in community-based organizations (CBOs).
“We are working together on a community co-design project where we’re bringing together different people who work at Neighborhood House and other Somali-serving community organizations to come up with how we adapt programs that work to support mental health and create low barrier, culturally relevant mental health care that can be integrated into social services,” said Lesley Steinman, a co-principal investigator and research scientist at University of Washington’s School of Public Health and HPRC.
“We’ve had a longstanding relationship with the Health Promotion Research Center and have been working together on PEARLS, the Program to Encourage and Reward Active Lives for the elderly community,” said Najma Mohammed, a co-principal investigator and community health nurse at NH. “So once we identified this need for the communities that we serve, needing more mental health care, we realized this is the perfect partner to work with.”
The project’s timeline runs until August 2024 and involves a multifaceted discovery and design/build process with co-design partners from CBOs to adapt and evaluate mental health screeners and resources for the Somali community.
The project team’s measures of success include five key markers like conducting problem analysis and specifying adaptations to existing interventions including community-defined solutions. These markers are led by an overarching goal of enhancing community engagement and well-being through the work of CBOs to bring essential mental health care to those in need.
Mohammed stated that the project is currently in its discovery stage and will soon be adapting the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Problem Management Plus (PM+) intervention toolkit in order to make mental health resources more culturally relevant to the Somali community.
“We’re really hoping that this project has a domino effect and that we’re able to target all these other linguistically and culturally diverse communities because we already know that they’re also having barriers to mental health care. We did choose our one community that is very resilient, but there is stigma around mental health in the Somali community and so we’re hoping that if we can help them, we’re able to help the other communities that have a similar stigma or taboo,” said Mohammed.
The project’s future goals include application for a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant, expanding the co-design process to other community partners and engaging a wider population of linguistically diverse communities of color.
“If we didn’t have the funding mechanisms like what PHI [Population Health Initiative] is doing, then we wouldn’t have the resources and the time to do this collaborative work with our community partners to create meaningful change and accessible resources. Some funders are starting to privilege that, but most still privilege a more top-down research approach with learnings largely limited to papers and presentations. If we continue on that model, we’re not going to develop tools and services and support that really help historically marginalized communities,” said Steinman.