Mental Health America awarded grant for Native Americans

Mental Health America Awarded Grant To Deliver Culturally Appropriate Support For Native Americans With Serious Mental Illness
Regional Approach to Eliminating
Behavioral Health Disparities
Contact: Steve Vetzner, (703) 797-2588 or svetzner@mentalhealthamerica.net

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (March 31, 2009)-Mental Health America today announced it has been awarded a $750,000 grant by Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation to develop culturally appropriate support for Native Americans with serious mental illness and in rural and frontier communities.

The program takes a regional approach toward eliminating behavioral health disparities among Native American and frontier populations.

The funding will be used to develop a peer-to-peer program for use in the Navajo and Ute Nations region in tribal lands in the Four Corners area (the borders of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona).

Mental Health America will also create education programs to help reduce the stigma and discrimination around mental health disabilities in the frontier and tribal lands of North Dakota.

Among the approaches to be used will be creation of leadership groups within tribal communities focusing on behavioral health, and peer-led mental health programs in tribal and frontier communities. Each year, 30 peer specialists are expected to graduate from peer-to-peer training to staff these programs.

Mental health America will work with MHA affiliates in Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and North Dakota to implement the program.

Many obstacles exist that prevent adequate and culturally competent behavioral health care in rural areas and for Native American populations. These include scarcity of professional staff, a lack of cultural and linguistically competent providers, discrimination and social stigma, a real fear that confidentiality won't be protected, financing and reimbursement issues, insufficient integration of behavioral (mental and substance use) with physical health, little prevention efforts, transportation difficulties and low numbers of providers.

Native Americans suffer from higher rates of suicide, alcohol abuse and/or dependence, post-traumatic stress disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome, poverty, homelessness and unemployment than any other cultural group.
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Mental Health America Awarded Grant