Affordable Care Act and Latino mental healthcare

The Huffington Post recently published an interesting article discussing how the ACA may improve Latino use of and engagement with mental healthcare. Although the prevalence rates of mental disorders among Latinos are not particularly high, the utilization of mental healthcare services is dramatically low. The research that has examined this underutilization has identified a number of community and systems-level barriers that adversely affect Latinos. These include insufficient numbers of community mental health centers, low numbers of bilingual/bicultural providers, and insurance and other finance-related obstacles. In addition, however, there is reason to believe that our existing models of mental healthcare delivery may not match well onto the cultural values and expectations of individuals from different cultural backgrounds. For example, in an article that we recently published, we found that many religious Latinos prefer their pastors because they have preexising relationships with them, an interesting datapoint that runs counter to the assumption that anonymity is critical and multiple roles should be avoided. It will be interesting to see if the ACA will address some of these issues if the focus on systems and community-level barriers proves insufficient to increase use of formal mental health services.

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