Boston College’s Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture just wrapped up its 13th annual Diversity Challenge, a conference devoted to the exploration of race and culture. This year’s conference focused on the intersection between race/culture and health/mental health. There were lively presentations, interesting dialogue, and challenging conversations. Our lab was well-represented this year, as Oswaldo Moreno gave an interesting presentation on some of our work on Latino men. He highlighted how our findings suggest that the expression of depression among Latino men has both standard (i.e., cognitive, affective, and physical) and culturally-salient (specific?) aspects. The culturally-salient aspects he explored included expressions of nostalgia for one’s country of origin, disillusionment with life in the U.S., and anger at unfair treatment.

I was invited to give a talk (BC Diversity Challenge 2013), and I chose to highlight limitations in current research on mental healthcare disparities, which include an overrepresentation of between-groups research, inattention to how experiences of distress are intricately related to treatment seeking, and a dearth of research on theoretically-guided psychological variables. These limitations play a part in society’s inability to successfully reduce these persistent disparities. I then presented some of our qualitative and quantitative findings from our Latino men’s study on treatment-seeking for depression, highlighting our growing support for our culture-, gender, and class-based model of treatment-seeking. Great experience all around!