Black Youth Mental Health
Black Youth Mental Health
The 2020 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ African American Youth Suicide: Report to Congress highlighted that Black youth had lower rates of current or past mental health problems despite higher rates of past suicide attempts suggesting that limited access to or use of mental health services may partially explain the disparity in suicide attempts.
The Morehouse School of Medicine received a grant from the U.S. Office of Minority Health to identify health and wellness policies that could be successful in improving Black youth mental health, including suicide prevention, and to subsequently test the impact of these policies on Black youth mental health across settings, such as schools, faith-based organizations, community centers, health centers, or other community agency settings.
As an evaluation partner, the Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC) is assisting the Morehouse School of Medicine in developing a policy assessment framework to identify existing policy solutions that they expect to promote mental health in Black youth in Georgia. GHPC will complete a process, outcomes, and impact evaluation that assesses the extent to which 1) implementation of the policy assessment protocol framework identified crossover effect of policies shown to be effective in addressing other health promotion and prevention areas on Black youth’s mental health 2) how the implemented tool resulted in improved adherence to the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care. Lastly, the evaluation will assess how the implemented tool resulted in analysis of policies across environmental and ecological factors, such as communications, physical environment, housing, education, and criminal justice.