Mental health resources weren't as readily accessible. I never thought to go to an authority
figure to talk about my mental health issues because no one ever did that. It was so stigmatized.
We have the Latino community, the Asian community -- largely Filipino -- of course now the LGBT
community is an emerging community in the county and in the Bay Area. So we have a very
low penetration rate in terms of usage of mental health services.
Well, I think that the challenges that Solano County has are challenges that are in any
county.
Now we have to be more in the community, and be on the ground working and helping the people
to survive in a very difficult environment.
Around high school I surpressed a lot of my mental health challenges. I didn't really
know what depression meant, or what PTSD meant. I just knew that's issues that you really
don't talk about, especially growing up in a very conservative Vietnamese community.
Based on the data, we have 8,000 eligible, medical eligible clients. Not all of them
have mental health issues obviously. But we have 200-some clients in Solano County that
use mental health services right now, over the last two or three years. That's the data
we have. So it's really very low.
In California, we have the Mental Health Services Act, which allows for communities to take
stock and invest in innovative transformation of their system. And so Solano County had
seen some of the work we had done with other organizations and reached out to collaborate
with us.
This is the dream of researchers like us. The need comes from the community itself.
Because they have heard about the things that we have been working on with our Center.
They decided to call it the "Cultural Transformation Model" because what they are hoping to do
is to transform the way in which services, especially mental health services, are provided
for these three target populations. The beauty about it is that so many stakeholders provided
input, valuable input, that now it is a model of Solano County.
So to address the disparities and to improve community mental health, we need more than
a set of standards. The standards can help guide the strategies and solutions, but we
need an engine to power these efforts. And that engine is people.
Clients can teach us as much as we can teach them, and we can learn from each other.
Counselors, therapists, psychologists that look like me, even just female-bodied, Asian,
queer, I would feel more comfortable approaching my issues.
If you're able to advertise a service that you can provide to the community, that doesn't
guarantee and in fact doesn't say anything about whether or not those services are actually
relevant. Part of the missing factor is "trust" -- building trust. And what that requires
is a relationship. So it's about engaging with the community members, with the community-based
organizations, and the county services to develop a sense of community and trust within
everybody involved.
We have an outreach coordinator, a clinician, who speaks Filipino, very familiar with the
culture, native speaker...
One of the critical pieces of all of this is that the outcomes, a specific metric, that
we are going to be using, are not going to come from folks like me, who are academicians.
We love to look at metrics and how to measure things. But also we are going to be consulting
with the communities themselves, and the county, and the community-based organizations as to
what matters to them.
The county, I think, is moving in the right direction in terms of the outreach and engagement.
And partnering with research institution like UC Davis. We've never done that before. So
this is truly an innovative project!