Assignment 11: Implementation

Despite showing signs of mental illness, Asian immigrant adults (ages 20-60) with disorders like schizophrenia and ADHD living in the United States are often undiagnosed and therefore untreated by doctors.

The intervention I most recommend would be asking community leaders to recommend utilization of mental health services and decrease stigma regarding mental illness within the community.

I would begin implementing this intervention by sending public health officials to various known community leaders, such as pastors and respected elders. I would try to send public health officials of the same race as the specific Asian community that I try to target using this intervention. I believe doing so would help with the next step which is to cultivate a relationship between the public health official and community leaders that will encourage utilization of mental health services and ending cultural stigma. If the public health official is not of the same race as the community leader, I don't think it will be a cultural barrier as long as there is no language barrier. If there is a language barrier, a translator would have to be found but I believe this can easily be done, possibly without cost if a member of the community volunteers to help communication between leaders and public health officials.

Public health officials would first explain the problem to leaders and ask them to encourage their followers to get help and refrain from ostracizing those with mental illnesses. I doubt that any community leaders will refuse to direct their followers to get professional help, but they may refuse for unforseen reasons. Public health officials and community leaders might work together to create an informative talk on mental health or a pamplet with information about mental health. These may cost some money but if the community leaders are willing to help, the community will most likely cover these costs. There are little infrastructure and monetary costs associated with this intervention because ideally, public health officials working with community leaders would utilize the community's existing tools to help spread the message.

The most important stakeholders in this intervention are the community leaders who are easy to identify and contact. I think all that is necessary to "get them on board" is to explain the long and short term benefits of encouraging mental health services and discouraging stigma against mental illness. Asian immigrants with mental illnesses will often turn to their community leaders instead of seeking professional help. Encouraging utilization of mental health services would decrease the burden that community leaders bear in taking care of these mentally ill constituents as well as the burden of conscience that they might feel when they cannot effectively help them. Though this intervention would take some effort on their part, in the end, they would gain more time to help other members of their community as well as a better conscience knowing that ill members are getting the help they need. The next group of stakeholders would be members who suffer from mental illnesses. They would benefit not only from getting medical help they need from professional mental health services, but they would also feel more comfortable in their social circles if stigma could be decreased. To gain these benefits they would have to listen to the community leaders' advice and utilize mental health services and maybe serve as examples that mentally ill people are not "crazy" to decrease stigma.

To evaluate the effectiveness of my intervention, I would have to do both a quantitative and qualitative study. I would need to quantitatively check measures of mental illness diagnoses in Asian immigrants such as whether the rates of utilization of mental health services are at sufficient levels. I would need to qualitatively check if Asian immigrant communities who have been subjected to the intervention feel less stigma regarding mental illnesses. If the measure of mental illness diagnoses are equal or nearing equal to that of comparable races and if studies show that there is less stigma regarding mental illness in Asian immigrant communities, then the intervention can be deemed successful.