Pueden encontrar la versión en español aquí.
According to the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, more than 90% of Utahns have been impacted by suicide in some way. After launching a suicide prevention playbook last year, the department is now offering those services in Spanish.
The Live On Spanish Playbook will be available for free on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Currently, eight short lessons are available to provide knowledge and skills, and to connect people with resources in order to make an impact in Utah’s Spanish-speaking communities.
“[Latinos are] less likely to seek help than the majority of the Caucasian community,” said Karla Arroyo, executive director of the Multicultural Counseling Center. “We don't know whether the [suicide] rates are higher or lower. What we do know is that they're less likely to seek help.”
Arroyo said the gap is, in part, a cultural one.
“What has happened culturally and traditionally with the Latino community is that you'll turn inwards,” she said.”The issue of mental health has not been addressed within the Latino community as it is something that has been seen as shameful. It's something that has always been looked at as only crazy people deal with it.”
The other part of that gap could also be a simple matter of translation, a realization that DHHS Spanish Public Information Officer Luisa Hansen described as “groundbreaking knowledge for us.”
“We learned that the barrier [to the Latino community] mainly was that we always talk about mental health and we translated it exactly the same: ‘salud mental,’ but that actually is very attached to what people think of as being institutionalized,” she said.
Instead, Hansen said the department now uses terms like “emotional health” to better encompass the wide range of issues someone could face, from chronic fatigue to anxiety.
“When we explain to them that maybe feeling fatigued, maybe feeling like not wanting to go to soccer on Sunday or maybe feeling tired or needing an energy drink every day, maybe that was your emotional health telling you that things are not well, they were so receptive of that.”
Utah’s Hispanic and Latino communities are growing. The state’s population of racial and ethnic minorities has more than doubled since 1990, according to a census analysis from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. Experts say one-third of the state could identify as a minority in the coming decades.
With a growing population, bilingual mental and emotional health resources could prove essential for newcomers to the state.
“[Immigrants] are facing a lot of barriers and a lot of struggles,” said Arroyo. “And they have to go through them by themselves.”
That help can extend beyond the state’s borders because many of the state’s families “still have a big support network in their native countries,” she said. “Parents oftentimes do not even have the skills to support their children or their wives or their husbands or other community members. And I think that's the importance of this.”
According to Hansen, more Spanish-language resources could be on the horizon.
“We recognize that our community is no longer as homogeneous as it was a few decades back,” added Hansen. “Utah has grown. It's growing diversely. Hispanics have always been the largest group of racial minorities … I expect many, many more things to come. We're pushing for it.”
