Is cultural appropriateness culturally specific? Intersectional insights from a community-based participatory mental health intervention study conducted with diverse cultural groups.

Growing evidence supports the importance of culturally appropriate mental health interventions, yet it is not always feasible to develop culturally grounded interventions or adapt existing interventions for each cultural group. In addition, these approaches do not recognize the multiple intersecting aspects of culture and identity that individuals, families, and communities possess. Thus, an essential question is whether culturally appropriate mental health interventions have to be culturally specific. We address this question by examining processes of the Refugee Well-being Project (RWP), a community-based mental health intervention for refugees resettled in the United States, which included people from multiple cultural groups (Afghanistan, Great Lakes region of Africa, Iraq, and Syria) and was grounded in common experiences of forcibly displaced people from marginalized backgrounds. RWP incorporates a practice-based concept of culture, an intersectional view of identity, and a multilevel approach to address postmigration stressors. Semistructured qualitative interviews were conducted with 290 participants at preintervention, followed by interviews at three timepoints with a purposively selected subsample (n = 66). Additional interviews (n = 101) were conducted with refugee and student partners. Four themes demonstrated key principles for creating culturally appropriate interventions with diverse groups: (a) recognize cultural complexity in practice; (b) focus on how racism and discrimination are experienced in everyday life; (c) de-center dominant US culture; and (d) create an egalitarian, inclusive space to put principles into action. We conclude that mental health interventions implemented with multiple, diverse groups can be culturally appropriate and effective without being culturally specific.

From multilevel to trans-level interventions: A critical next step for creating sustainable social change to improve mental health.

Eliminating mental health disparities requires simultaneously addressing numerous determinants of health, including social inequities. Although emphasis on multilevel change is growing, interventions typically involve separate efforts or people focusing on each level. We propose a trans-level conceptual model for mental health intervention that simultaneously facilitates change across multiple intersecting levels with four guiding principles: (1) emphasis on structural change; (2) involvement of people experiencing health and social inequities in achieving structural change by addressing the necessary preconditions of access to resources for basic needs, community membership and belonging, and knowledge or information to participate in social change efforts; (3) valuing and building on the expertise and strengths of individuals, families, and communities experiencing health inequities; and (4) dismantling unequal power dynamics of helping relationships through a focus on mutual learning and support and cocreation of change. Tracing the trajectory of a 23-year community-based mental health intervention partnership (the Refugee and Immigrant Well-Being Project), we illustrate the trans-level intervention model and describe its impact on individual mental health and sustainable change at multiple levels. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Protocol of the study: Multilevel community-based mental health intervention to address structural inequities and adverse disparate consequences of COVID-19 pandemic on Latinx Immigrants and African refugees.

The NIMH-funded Multilevel Community-Based Mental Health Intervention to Address Structural Inequities and Adverse Disparate Consequences of COVID-19 Pandemic on Latinx Immigrants and African Refugees study aims to advance the science of multilevel interventions to reduce the disparate, adverse mental health, behavioral, and socioeconomic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic that are a result of complex interactions between underlying structural inequities and barriers to health care. The study tests three nested levels of intervention: 1) an efficacious 4-month advocacy and mutual learning model (Refugee and Immigrant Well-being Project, RIWP); 2) engagement with community-based organizations (CBOs); and 3) structural policy changes enacted in response to the pandemic. This community-based participatory research (CBPR) study builds on long-standing collaboration with five CBOs. By including 240 Latinx immigrants and 60 African refugees recruited from CBO partners who are randomly assigned to treatment-as-usual CBO involvement or the RIWP intervention and a comparison group comprised of a random sample of 300 Latinx immigrants, this mixed methods longitudinal waitlist control group design study with seven time points over 36 months tests the effectiveness of the RIWP intervention and engagement with CBOs to reduce psychological distress, daily stressors, and economic precarity and increase protective factors (social support, access to resources, English proficiency, cultural connectedness). The study also tests the ability of the RIWP intervention and engagement with CBOs to increase access to the direct benefits of structural interventions. This paper reports on the theoretical basis, design, qualitative and quantitative analysis plan, and power for the study.

Measuring culturally and contextually specific distress among Afghan, Iraqi, and Great Lakes African refugees.

Culturally and contextually valid measurement of psychological distress is critical, given the increasing numbers of forcibly displaced people and transnational migration. This study replicates an inductive process that elicited culturally specific expressions, understandings, and idioms of distress among Afghans to develop culturally specific measures of distress for Great Lakes Africans and Iraqis and expands this methodology to include a focus on the contexts of refugees resettled in the United States. To create the measures, we adapted Miller et al.'s (2006) model for the Afghan Symptom Checklist (ASCL) and conducted 18 semistructured qualitative interviews that attended to refugees' multiple settings; the impact of potentially traumatic events initially and postresettlement; and the experiences and impact of resettlement stressors. We tested the newly developed measures and existing ASCL with 280 recently resettled refugees (< 3 years) from Afghanistan, the Great Lakes region of Africa, and Iraq to assess factor structure, reliability, and construct validity. We successfully replicated and adapted a process for creating culturally specific measures of distress to create reliable and valid scales that consider culturally and contextually specific distress among several groups of forcibly displaced people. Our results highlight the salience of individuals' social contexts and how they are manifested as idioms of distress, bringing together two key areas of research: the social construction of mental health and social determinants of mental health. These findings have implications for improving measurement of psychological distress and for developing multilevel interventions that are culturally resonant and address factors beyond the individual level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).