Latina Adolescents' Family Mental Health Socialization

Background and Purpose: Mental health issues are a wide-spread and persistent disparity among Latina adolescents, who report higher rates of depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts compared to their peers. Compounding those mental health concerns, Latina youth are less likely to seek mental health services than their peers, and mental health care continues to be stigmatized in Latinx immigrant communities. The purpose of this research was to explore Latina young people’s retrospective accounts of their mental health experiences in adolescence to understand the messages about mental health they received in their families growing up and the impact of these messages on participants’ mental health management strategies.

Methods: This research used a collaborative critical narrative inquiry approach to center participants in the knowledge creation process. We combined retrospective, narrative interviews with participatory digital art-making, and published two digital publications for Latina teens to ensure that findings were disseminated within the community context under study. Participants were Latinas aged 18-23 of diverse national backgrounds residing in the New York City metropolitan area. 25 participants were interviewed over Zoom for an average of 60 minutes, and 10 of those participants were involved in the digital art-making process over a span of 4 months. Our research team used holistic and categorical content analysis approaches to inductively identify themes within and across narratives and artworks. Participants received a copy of their interview transcript and a summary of results for member-checking.

Results: Participants described hearing stigmatizing, minimizing, and silencing messages about mental health within their families growing up. Stigmatizing messages included: “therapy is for the ultimately broken;” “take care of it within the home;” and “we’ve given you a good life, why would you need therapy?.” Minimizing messages identified were: “power through;” “your parents came from so much worse;” and “just pray.” Silencing messages included: “that’s not something that happens to us;” and “we just disregard it.” These messages impacted participants’ mental health management by teaching them to suppress emotion, and expressing a preference for peer support as they felt unable to turn to family members or professionals to address mental health concerns.

Conclusions and Implications: These findings suggest that Latina young peoples’ mental health management is influenced by the family context. Specifically, family mental health socialization - a theoretical framework arising from this study defined as the process through which young people learn and internalize the mental health-related beliefs, behaviors, norms, and expectations of the cultural and family context in which they live - is an important factor to consider regarding Latina young people’s mental health care preferences. Further research is needed to test and refine the theoretical framework of family mental health socialization with broader groups. Interventions that target specific messages to reduce mental health stigma within Latinx communities and peer support models may be promising methods of reducing mental health disparities among Latina adolescents. Digital art-making and other collaborative inquiry approaches may help to democratize mental health knowledge within this community.