Effect Of Discrimination On Mental Health

This study of discrimination of mental health investigated the association between discrimination and mental health service utilization among Chinese Americans. Their findings suggest that discrimination on mental health is associated with greater use of informal services and with help seeking from friends or relatives, but not with use of formal services. The study suggestion that language-based and racial or ethnic discrimination are associated with patterns of service utilization was only partially supported.

Although racial or ethnic discrimination of mental health was not significantly associated with service use, discrimination resulting from speaking a different language and having an accent was an important stressor that can influence the types of services individuals may use. These type of study and findings support bilingual and bicultural services as a means for providing culturally sensitive services to Chinese Americans who may have experienced discrimination resulting from lack of English-language proficiency.

The findings of mental health also underscore the differential effects of barriers on use of formal services, use of informal services, and seeking help from friends or relatives. Negative attitudes toward formal activities are associated with greater use of informal services. To help counteract these unusual attitudes, formal service agencies could establish collaborative partnerships with informal service providers in the area and refer clients to them when necessary. Efforts to merge traditional healing methods with evidence-based practices should also be examined. Normally almost no research on mental health has been done on empirically supported interventions for Chinese Americans. Providers of formal mental health services can also capitalize on the common practice of seeking help from friends and relatives by encouraging and supporting positive social networks through new and existing community-based support groups. Such type of groups might be developed around specific interest areas, such as cooking, gardening, walking, or games.

Their findings also show that individuals with various medical insurance are more likely to seek formal health care services, whereas individuals without medical insurance are more likely to seek help from friends or relatives. In addition to health care improvement making mental health services readily available to all individuals, more multilingual education is needed regarding the availability of Medicaid; increased funding also is needed for community-based agencies that serve new immigrant populations and the uninsured.

The limitations of this type of study must be noted. Firstly the instrument used to measure the perceived discrimination of mental health did not assess discrimination in multiple other areas of life or gather information on the frequency of exposure over the life course. Development of various measures of discrimination is in its infancy, and continued research in this area is needed. Although they used longitudinal data, because they combined prevalence rates across 2 waves in computing our study variables, they could not identify causal relations between the independent variables and their dependent variables. For instance individuals may have much negative attitudes toward service use before the study on mental health because of negative past experiences with formal services. Thus by combining the 2-wave data they cannot establish temporal ordering and thus cannot attribute a causal relationship between their study variables.

• Emma Bullock
• 24/01/2009, 10:59 AM
• 0 Comments