July is BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month. CLASP’s mental health work centers on systems and policy change with an explicit focus on how race and ethnicity affect a person’s interactions with systems and services. We are working to reimagine how our national, state, and local mental and behavioral health systems could better serve people living in households with low incomes. The following resources offer insight into key issues, strategies, and principles surrounding mental health.
New Resources
Check out Time Magazine’s article, “Instagram and Facebook Parental Controls Could Actually Put Vulnerable Teens at Risk, Experts Warn,” by Simmone Shah, featuring Nia West-Bey. In this piece, Simmone explores how Meta’s new parental controls aimed at providing more oversight for teenagers who use Instagram, Facebook and Messenger can actually put young people who rely on online communities as a lifeline at risk. Nia urges policymakers to “make policy decisions with the most marginalized folks in mind because that actually ends up getting us better policy for everybody.”
In April 2023, the Utah DHHS Office of Substance Use and Mental Health, CLASP, andNAMI Utah hosted the first Youth-in-Transition Policy summit. The summit highlighted 5 policies focused on improving access to mental health care for transition-age youth (ages 16-25), as they face many issues as they transition to adulthood, including high rates of being uninsured, a shortage of youth-friendly providers, a lack of integrated care, and service cliffs. A panel of youth experts facilitated the policy presentations, evaluated each policy, and offered suggestions to panelists on how to improve their policies to better meet the needs of young people. The findings of the summit are expressed in the accompanying brief, “Allyship that Saves Lives: Policies to Support Youth-In-Transition.” A common theme from the youth panelists was that policymakers must invest in young people, embed and center them in all systems and systems development. Young people deserve a seat at the table, and if they’re not invited they will bring their own chair.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE SUMMIT
New Op-Eds
Our nation has a well-documented shortage of clinical mental health providers. The truth is that we will never have enough mental health clinicians to meet young people’s mental health needs, nor are they the kinds of providers that young people prefer. However, Nia West-Bey highlights an example of a promising program aimed at young adults in New Orleans in her op-ed, In New Orleans, Community Mental Health Workers Staff Youth Workforce Development Programs. New Orleans has created a new model of mental health service drawing on the strengths of youth peer support and community health work to meet the needs of youth in workforce development programs.
In her op-ed, Villainizing and restricting social media will worsen, not help, youth mental health, Nia-West Bey analyzes that using policy to crack down on teens’ social media usage is a distraction from what many young people — particularly those from marginalized communities — say are the real threats to youth mental health. Across a diversity of identities, young people consistently and repeatedly identify three major sources of their mental distress: racism and other forms of discrimination, violence in their communities and financial strain — not social media. In her op-ed, Nia advocates that decision-making about social media access must include the voices and leadership of young people, particularly those from marginalized communities.
In Case You Missed It
Take a look at this incredible video of Aaron Armer, a youth partner based in Sacramento, speaking about mental health as part of their interview for Pride and Immigrant Heritage Month in 2020. CLASP’s Young Adult Engagement Strategy (YAES) intentionally consults with young leaders who are experts in their respective policy fields, centering their voices in our national policy agenda and working toward narrative change.
Upcoming Events
Join CLASP for our quarterly learning series focused on decolonizing mental health care, i.e. not relying entirely on the biomedical model, and emphasizing the importance of healing-centered care. Each quarter, we host a conversation with partners in the field about the colonization of mental health systems, the key frameworks required to decolonize mental health, healing-centered programs that work, and how public policy can support these movements.
On July 26 from 4-5p, we are hosting a conversation with Cara Page like we did in 2020, this time to talk about her work on acknowledging and disrupting the medical industrial complex. We’ll continue our conversation from the first webinar session about healing justice as a movement, and together, we’ll learn about healing practices that have worked and continue to support Black and brown populations. We’ll also talk about her latest book anthology, Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety.
This webinar series is part of the Healing Centered Liberation Policy framework we launched in 2020. Healing-centered liberation policy thinks beyond what is and demands what should be. It requires new decision-making structures, acknowledges failed and abandoned policies, and recognizes both historical harms and ongoing discrimination. Because our current mental health system is steeped in historical and structural racism, we must reimagine how public policy can respond to inequity beyond our existing systems. Please join us!
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