Mental health care in Latino communities has made strides. Nonprofits that help need city funding.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, it’s important we turn our attention to an issue that significantly impacts Latino communities and is often overlooked: mental health. 

Latino community members face significant barriers to accessing mental health resources. Among those barriers are cultural stigmas, language barriers, cost, and a lack of diverse and culturally competent providers to whom they feel connected. 

Chicagoans would certainly benefit from additional mental health resources, including the reopening of shuttered mental health clinics, and there is no doubt we need to do more to grow the pipeline of mental health professionals. But we do not need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to providing mental health services to Latinos in Chicago. 

Community-based nonprofits have grown their mental health services, thanks to increased investment in the last four years. They’ve leveraged relationships and reputations they’ve built in their communities to help them reach Latinos and connect them to the mental health support they need.

Continued investment in these community-based providers is an investment in the well-being of Latinos. To meet growing demand, we will need support from the Johnson administration. Changing strategies now would threaten our communities that were significantly impacted over a decade ago when former Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed community clinics. 

Latinos’ mental health needs are similar to other communities, but the rate at which Latinos access care is much lower than other demographics. Nationally, just 36.1% of Latino adults who had a mental illness in 2021 received services, compared to 52.4% of whites, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health. 

‘Our communities need healing’

Going to a mental health provider or even asking for help is an uncomfortable concept for many Latinos, who are often raised to believe that you deal with emotional turmoil, stress, anxiety, or feelings of sadness and depression on your own, with the help of your family, or your faith community. These stigmas are even stronger in older generations.

Latino communities in Chicago face unique challenges, and our community members are overcoming trauma that has been perpetuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, record inflation, high rates of homelessness and job insecurity. Our communities need healing, and social service providers, like Association House and many member organizations in the Illinois Latino Agenda, that are rooted in Latino communities are advocating on their behalf and prioritizing their mental health needs. 

Nonprofit community-based providers are already implementing what the American Psychiatric Association recommends to achieve quality mental health treatment, prevention and early intervention for Latinos. We are providing community partnerships, culturally and linguistically appropriate treatment, workforce development to sustain a culturally and linguistically competent mental health workforce, and community outreach and engagement. But we are stretched thin and will need additional funding and support from the city so we can continue supporting our communities. 

Local studies have reinforced through their recommendations that to best provide mental health support to Latino communities, there needs to be community-level information about mental health and available resources, and services must be culturally relevant and community-based. That’s why we connect with other trusted community institutions to share information about the resources we provide, and why we’ve prioritized building a workforce that provides culturally relevant and linguistically appropriate care.

Families who come into our facilities for a specific need, like access to housing, are able to connect with our staff, who can then refer them to additional services they need to improve their overall well-being. This whole-person approach has helped us make a real difference in the lives of our neighbors. 

Seeing demand for mental health care continue to increase in Latino communities means that our strategies are working. More people are seeking help and stigmas are changing.

Continued investment in the existing community-based mental health providers that Latinos know and trust will be vital to the health of our communities. Just as important is developing creative solutions to address workforce shortages so that we can build a pipeline of diverse mental health providers to keep up with a growing demand. 

There’s still a lot of work to be done to improve the accessibility of quality mental health care in our city and reopening clinics may be part of that strategy, as long as the city takes an equitable approach to evaluating how their decisions will impact all communities throughout Chicago. 

Juan Carlos Linares is president and CEO of Association House and a member of the Illinois Latino Agenda.

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