I tripped over a surprising bit of news over at Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments. Hispanic teens are suffering the highest rates of mental health and chemical health issues according to a recent CDC press release.

In the recent upsurge in interest regarding immigration issues, many Hispanics youths, who themselves are American citizens are being swept up in racism and ill-advised nationalism. No matter where you fall on the issues, the health of American citizens should be something that everyone can agree on. With upwards of 10 and 15% of Hispanic youths reporting attempted suicide, this survey should serve as a clear call to action.

The issue is about children of Hispanic parents, a large proportion of their parents are Spanish speaking immigrants. This creates problems unique to Hispanic teens.

MercuryNews.com

More than 11 percent of all Latino students -- and 15 percent of Latino girls -- said they had attempted suicide, according to the report issued Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The white and black rates were about 7.5 percent. Latinos also reported much higher rates of cocaine, heroin, ``ecstasy'' and methamphetamines use. Their use of condoms was at lower rates than the other groups.

Local youth counselors say they are not surprised by the numbers. In all categories of high-risk behavior, including drug abuse and teen pregnancy, the proportion of Latino youths with problems is rising, they say. ``Teen pregnancy has dropped overall, but among Latino youth it's gone higher,'' said Mario Ozuna-Sanchez, manager of intervention services for the Mexican American Community Service Agency in San Jose. ``Latino youth are 70 percent of juvenile hall right now.''

One reason, he said, is a lack of services targeted at Latino communities. ``There's not only a lack of services in general, there's a lack of services in English and Spanish, services targeted toward parents,'' Ozuna-Sanchez said. ``Everyone knows the problem, but few people are addressing it.''

We need to actively encourage training Hispanic practitioners. And we need to encourage therapists to develop bilingual skills to serve these under served families.

I've added an archive of resources for Health and Mental Health Professionals on Cultural Competency

Link here: http://dare-to-dream.us/cultural_diversity/

Let me know if you have some more resources and links I can add.

The NY Times published an article last week quoting some sobering statistics about inner city black youth. Six in 10 black men in their 30s who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison. Fifty percent of black youths don't finish high school. Unemployment for black high school dropouts has peaked at 72%.

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, wrote a courageous article in the NY Times today. Despite recent economic advances of other minorities and African American women, generations of African American young men continue to failed to integrate in the larger culture. He challenges the the traditional explanations of bad schools, discrimination and few jobs. He suggest the African American culture is a major contributing factor. The culture has evolved in just 145 years from the tortured history of slavery, through the oppression of "Jim Crow" laws to the "cool-pose culture" of today. That "cool-pose culture" raises boy's self-esteem as effectively as it locks him out of the mainstream opportunities.

A Poverty of the Mind - New York Times

So what are some of the cultural factors that explain the sorry state of young black men? They aren't always obvious. Sociological investigation has found, in fact, that one popular explanation — that black children who do well are derided by fellow blacks for "acting white" — turns out to be largely false, except for those attending a minority of mixed-race schools.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and going on to college ("We're not stupid!" they told her indignantly).

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths. This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.

I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important thing to note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is not disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has powerful support from some of America's largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

Of course, such attitudes explain only a part of the problem. In academia, we need a new, multidisciplinary approach toward understanding what makes young black men behave so self-destructively. Collecting transcripts of their views and rationalizations is a useful first step, but won't help nearly as much as the recent rash of scholars with tape-recorders seem to think. Getting the facts straight is important, but for decades we have been overwhelmed with statistics on black youths, and running more statistical regressions is beginning to approach the point of diminishing returns to knowledge.

The tragedy unfolding in our inner cities is a time-slice of a deep historical process that runs far back through the cataracts and deluge of our racist past. Most black Americans have by now, miraculously, escaped its consequences. The disconnected fifth languishing in the ghettos is the remains. Too much is at stake for us to fail to understand the plight of these young men. For them, and for the rest of us.

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is the author of "Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries."