​Prioritizing Mental Health in Minority Communities

By Yasir Mungani
 
Prioritizing mental health in minority communities is important now more than ever. Health literacy would be the first thing we strengthen if we are to make everyone understand what exactly mental health is. Focus the billions we spend on translation and interpretation services to a more defined scope and target the community leaders of these minority heavy areas. Mental health conversations should happen more often and we should strive to create an environment that allows questions to be asked and answered with no shame. Once we understand mental illnesses and exactly how much of an impact they have, we can move on to address prevention causes and what we have in store to help each other to lead healthy lives. Prevention causes such as holding weekly meetings in the community to teach parents how they can be allies to their children, how they can be allies to each other since mental illness spares no one. How can mental health be more than a unit in our health classes in high school, we should work towards making students feel comfortable with mental health and give them enough knowledge to know when they’re not okay and that it is more than okay to reach out and ask for help and also make sure who they can go to.