The School of Public Health hosted an event focused on mental health research in the Providence Latinx community on Wednesday. The event was held to honor Hispanic Heritage Month while promoting community-building and awareness of local cultural issues that public health can address, according to Barret Fabris, assistant dean of diversity and inclusion at the SPH.
The SPH invited local organization Mi Gente, an outpatient mental health clinic based at Bradley Hospital in East Providence, to speak about Latinx mental health. Yovanska Duarte-Velez — clinical director of Mi Gente — discussed her recent study on suicidal behavior in Latinx youth.
Duarte-Velez — who is also a child and family psychologist and an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School — began her talk by emphasizing the prevalence of Latinx residents in Providence, Pawtucket and Central Falls. She noted that a significant proportion of Latinx students nationwide have reported feeling sad or hopeless almost every day for a period of two weeks or longer.
To learn how to address the issue, Duarte-Velez talked to 10 clinicians in Rhode Island to determine the challenges in seeing Latinx families who are facing suicide crises. From those clinicians’ perspectives, the mental health issue should be considered in the context of the affected students’ society, community and family, she added.
Her most recent research project, a randomized clinical trial involving over 100 Latinx adolescents, was published this July. The trial compared a new form of therapy specifically for Latinx youth called socio-cognitive behavioral therapy for suicidal behaviors to typical mental health treatments. The trial ultimately determined that SCBT-SB was a much more effective treatment among Latinx teens.
Duarte-Velez concluded that while SCBT-SB can reduce gaps in health service disparities and give patients culturally-centered and affirmative mental health care, public health researchers still face another challenge: normalizing reaching out for help.
Attendee Carlos Fuentes GS, a second-year MPH student, said that the “Lunch and Learn” events are important because they connect organizations like Mi Gente that are already doing meaningful work with the Brown community. Introducing this work to the “Brown bubble,” he said, could bring people in the community to contribute to these organizations.
“A big component of the MPH program here at Brown is community engagement,” Fuentes said. “And I think specifically, how do we incorporate research into the engagements that we’re taking part in?”
After attending the “Lunch and Learn” event, Alvaro Uribe GS, a first-year MPH student, said they were thinking about the role of culture in mental health treatment.
“Culture, oftentimes in health, can be framed as a barrier to overcome or understand,” Uribe said. “But I think that their presentation also pointed out the many ways that (culture is) a strength too.”
Fabris, who helped organize Wednesday’s event, said that the “Lunch and Learn” aimed to not only honor a group and their work, but also show how public health can address “cultural barriers, stereotypes, access, all those different things to meet the needs of the local population.”
He added that in the past, faculty and staff would attend separate “Lunch and Learn” events, but Wednesday’s session hosted both groups to further build community.
“I wanted that collective knowledge and experience in the room to share, to form community (and) build possibilities for collaboration going forward,” Fabris said.
Marat Basaria is a senior staff writer covering activism.
