Eight years ago, Adriana Alejandra Alejandre became a 19-year-old single mother and suffered postpartum depression, diagnosed by a psychologist. She was in the sophomore year of college at the University of Santa Barbara. She had grown up in a strict-parent, Hispanic immigrant home in Los Angeles, California, with a Mexican father, a mother who had fled Guatemala at age fifteen, and three siblings. She wasn’t aware, as she told her story to Al Día News, that her mental health was part of her overall well being.
This sudden change in her life meant “intense struggles” for Alejandre, she told Voyage LA. “Finding myself as a young woman, mother and student impacted my mental health and I struggled with anxiety because of this. The uncertainty and doubt from others also did not help my anxiety and stress. I experienced people (even teachers) doubting that I could have a future with a child by my side.”
The stigma was there and she only realized it when she was diagnosed. The stigma said that seeking psychological or psychiatric help meant being crazy.
“I realized that there was so much fear…seeking out more mental health services, because if you sought out for help, that means you are crazy, or that means it’s just really for the white culture because they’re crazy, and we don’t have any problems,” she said. “And, if we do have problems, we talk about it inside the home, and we don’t get involved with any systems,” Alejandre told Al Día News’ Emily Neil.
Her psychologist’s diagnosis mobilized her to the point that she decided to take on course in abnormal psychology and then a master’s degree where after which she became a licensed therapist.
In 2017, she opened a Counseling and Trauma Therapy practice that specializes in trauma and anxiety in teenagers and adults.
In the meantime, she wanted to do something to break the stigma in the Latino community. She knew that the first step was to network and to talk openly about mental health. So, in April 2018, she created the Latinx Therapy platform.
In the United States, one in five people has a moderate or severe mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The latest data is from 2016: 44.7 million adults over the age of 18 suffered from mental illnesses of various types that year –that is 18.3% of all adults in the country. And 15.7% of all Hispanic adults. On the other hand, 2016, 10.4 million adults in the United States and 3.6% of Latino adults suffered from serious mental illness.
While the average number of mental health treatments received by adults in the US were 43.1%, in the Hispanic community it was only 31.1%.
This is what Adriana Alejandre wants to help change with this platform, which has a directory of more than 1000 bilingual Latino professional therapists, in addition to an inventory of 200 nonprofit organizations that provide mental health treatment at low costs.
“Demystifying mental health stigmas in the Latinx community one diagnosis, one myth, one conversation at a time,” is the motto of Latinx Therapy instagram account.
Alejandre also hosts a bilingual podcast, with a section called Breaking the Stigma, and with a segment to answer questions from the audience– people can record them in voice messages on the web.
When Adriana Alejandre first launched the platform, she told Al Día News, her e-mail inbox was full with messages from people telling her they ignored they had the option of choosing a professional therapist, much less that they could be Latino.
“People were really, really craving to get into therapy with a Latinx professional, which was so beautiful. It was something that I didn’t even think about, necessarily. Because I am a Latinx mental health professional, I didn’t think that people were struggling [to find] their own.”
On the platform’s blog, Adriana Alejandre wrote that the purpose of Latinx Therapy is to make an educational change within her community by providing them with direct access to a professional. “(…) We are now in a generation where mental health is spoken about and there are more bilingual services, thankfully (…)We need to remove that avoidance to mental health services. If you have once feared that you won’t be understood in therapy because there are not Latinx Therapists, this website is one of your homes now.”
That educational change also involves, Alejandre reminds Al Día News, reassuring the members of Latino community that therapists are neither ethically nor legally obligated to report the immigration status of their patients.
In the interview with Emily Neil, Adriana Alejandre predicts that within 10 years, between 50 and 60% of Hispanics will seek mental health treatment.
What’s needed is to continue networking, she says. “We need connection in order to not feel like there’s something wrong with us.”
Photo of Adriana Alejandre taken from her website Counseling and Trauma Therapy