Telling the story of the ethnic elderly: torn souls
So much tears at their hearts. They are alone. They lost what they had years ago. They never got back on their feet.
They can’t seem to find friends, find a place for themselves, find their voices, find a way to feel at ease, at home, at rest, at last, at rest.
The elderly suffer from depression, but the ethnic elderly endure it even more greatly.
This is one of the topics we’ll talk about at our meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, Feb. 23rda in a briefing for the ethnic news media from 10 am to noon at Age Options, 1048 Lake St. Suite 300, Oak Park.
And here is a story from New America Media that precisely makes the point about the mental health of the ethnic elderly.
See you there, Steve, steve@newstips.org or 773 595 8667
Managing her diabetes day-to-day is a constant struggle for Maria Carr. Like so many black elders, the 68-year-old San Franciscan must wrestle so much with the debilitating effects of chronic illness—the neuropathy that weakens her ability to walk or the continual pin pricks to test for blood sugar levels—that it gets her down.
It’s in those low hours that Carr’s thoughts often drift back to her “rotten childhood” on a farm in her native Jamaica and the constant verbal abuse she endured from her stepfather.
“People think about their past history,” said Carr. “I’m prepared for the worst. I’m not in the best health, but my mind is still okay. When I get depressed, though, it’s very difficult. Sometimes I wish I could die.”
Study: Ethnic Differences Suggest How Mental Health Services Can Better Serve Elders
“Racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive lower overall mental health care,” including less outpatient care and fewer visits to mental health specialists, said Daniel E. Jimenez, a research associate at Dartmouth Medical School.
But ending disparities in mental health care between ethnic elders and non-Latino Whites, Jimenez said, isn’t a simple matter of improving access to care. At the Gerontological Society of America conference last fall, Jimenez and colleagues at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research showed that mental health care providers need to better understand differences among various groups to realize how to treat each more effectively.
Their analysis of data on almost 3,000 people ages 50 and older reveals patterns that can help mental health professionals reach out to ethnic seniors better. For example, although many Latinos generally have access to mental health care similar to that of non-Latino whites, older Hispanics are more apt to discuss mental health issues with their doctor than seek psychological counseling
Asian seniors in the study also had good access to mental health services but were deterred from seeking help by intense social stigma, which “carries with it a high level of shame and embarrassment.”
Furthermore, Jimenez and his co-researchers found, “The American health care system focuses on individual ailments, rather than taking a holistic approach.” Asian elders are frequently wary of Western medicine, and only use it as a last resort, when traditional folk remedies are not working,” they added.
The study did expose access disparities between older whites and Africa Americans, but Jimenez and colleagues noted that many blacks refrain from seeking mental health services because of significant distrust of health and mental health professionals, due to widespread discrimination over the years.
Jimenez and his co-researchers added, “Cultural differences may go unaddressed, which can lead to African American patients feeling underappreciated, misunderstood and less engaged in treatment.”
In another recent study in the January 2010 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, Hector Gonzalez and colleagues at Wayne State University in Detroit found that mental health researchers need to end the common practice of lumping people together as Asians, African Americans and so on, and do more to differentiate, say, between, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans or African Americans and black Caribbean.
Carr is among the four in 10 black older women who live alone in the United States. She is philosophical about her condition and knows that chronic illness can set off bouts with depression.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), depression is the most prevalent mental health problem among older adults.
Although groups of ethnic elders experience percentages of serious depression similar to that of older whites (about one in six people ages 50 or older at some point) mental health experts say that African-American, Latino, Asian and Native-American seniors are less apt to get treated. That’s because of their higher levels of poverty, lack of insurance or access to treatment and the pervasive stigma of mental illness in many cultures.
Comments
No Comments