Immigrants to Nanaimo who need mental health services aren’t always using them and the Central Vancouver Island Multicultural Society wants to know why.
The organization’s settlement program is the first point of contact for more than 1,100 newcomers to Nanaimo and in the last year, Samantha Letourneau, settlement manager, said the society has noticed that some who need to access mental health services aren’t doing so.
This fall, the society will launch a year-long Intercultural Mental Health Equity Project with nearly $60,000 from the City of Nanaimo to explore why newcomers hesitate to use mental health services, potential barriers and how community services could be better delivered to diverse cultures and people.
Moving to a new country can bring all kinds of challenges – economic, social and mental, whether that’s issues of depression or anxiety or PTSD or other things, according to Letourneau.
“We’re looking at addressing barriers to care and to deliver culturally responsive and culturally specific mental health services that would be tailored to the needs of newcomer families,” said Letourneau of what would come out of research.
“There is a lot of study that’s been done around cultural safety and this is building off of that but looking now at immigrant and refugee populations.”
The project will also involve a pilot program to test recommendations from the study. That the city will contribute a grant towards the work is “wonderful news,” said Letourneau, adding the society appreciates the city seeing the importance in a project like this.
If they can create a model to address potential barriers to accessing mental health services, that’s transferable to other individuals who may also hesitate to access services, she said.
John Horn, the City of Nanaimo’s social planner, has been involved in a Syrian supports co-ordinating committee since the federal government first announced it was going to take in refugees and said what the group’s clearly seen and what he’s hearing from people, especially in the school system, is that once families go through the honeymoon of being in a new country then things come flooding up, like the trauma experienced in Syria.
He said younger kids were holding it together for the first couple months, but then they’d start to let their guard down and show behaviours of kids who’d been traumatized by violence.
“The school system really was saying we have some capacity to deal with mental health issues in the school system, but it’s nowhere near what we’d need to respond to this group of kids and there’s lots of them and they are all ages and stages in their life,” Horn said.
He added that he was approached about paying attention to the mental health of the kids, who could integrate, be comfortable and proceed in their lives if they can get through the trauma. If it wasn’t dealt with, he said, their progress here would be impeded and they wouldn’t be successful.
“We’ve taken lots of steps to help these people integrate into our community with housing and language and helping families connect with local families, so we’ve done the easy bits,” he said. “This is a tough bit about how we’re going to deal with these mental health challenges.”
The study rang all the right bells for Horn, who said it’s a small investment of money but if it helps half the kids be successful as they move forward, it’s money well spent.
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