COUNTYWIDE : Social Work Group Forms to Aid Latinos

After years of seeing Latinos wait longer for counseling or not get mental health services at all because of language and cultural barriers, a group of professionals in Orange County has joined together to improve those services.

The Orange County Spanish-Speaking Mental Health Professionals was created by Latinos who also want to help foster greater cultural sensitivity among people who work with the Latino community.

“We first started talking about this a year ago with four people,” said Eileen Olmsted, a social worker with the Orange County youth and family services division. “We feel that there are inadequate services for mental and emotional help” for Spanish speakers.

Finding few Latino colleagues when she finished graduate school, Olmsted said she realized that, as a result, scores of people in need of professional mental health assistance probably were not receiving it.

Group members say they hope to increase the number of professionals fluent in Spanish and provide cultural training to people who work with the Latino community.

“We know that anybody (mental health professional) who speaks Spanish gets a job overnight,” said Irene Bernal, director of family services for the Gary Center in La Habra. The six full- and part-time therapists there all speak Spanish.

The new group is made up of counselors, psychiatrists, social workers, para-professionals and administrators all fluent in Spanish. Some members want to concentrate on research to find out what problems are most prevalent in the Latino community, and address those problems.

Some members also asked the County Board of Supervisors to spare mental health care from the budget ax.

The professionals involved say they see daily examples of the lack of care in the Latino community. One day recently, for example, a 15-year-old rape victim who spoke only Spanish contacted the county’s Child Abuse Services Team for help, said Diane Gomez-Valenzuela, president of the new group. All the Spanish-speaking counselors were with other clients, so she was asked to wait. Then it was suggested that she talk to another counselor who speaks some Spanish and bring along a dictionary to look up words the counselor did not understand.

“That was just one example of how many counselors are not around, not skilled, not aware and not sensitive to the Latino community,” Gomez-Valenzuela said.

Further, she said, the two most well-known medical facilities in the county, UCI Medical Center in Orange and Children’s Hospital of Orange County, lack Spanish-speaking therapists in their outpatient psychiatric services. Both hospitals use interpreters, who may not be trained in mental health, in dealing with patients.

Rosa Brockette is the only person in the psychology department at Children’s Hospital of Orange County who speaks Spanish, so the Peruvian-born secretary, who is now taking psychology courses at Irvine Valley College, translates for patients and their doctors.

“The Spanish-speaking clients are just happy because they just need to talk sometimes,” Brockette said.

She estimates that sometimes half of their patients are Spanish speakers. Many of those patients also consider seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist an embarrassment, she said.

“They are really in need of support, but they just don’t know psychologists and that they can help. When you talk to them you just know there are so many problems within the family.”

Dr. Frank Carden, director of health psychology at Children’s Hospital, said problems also occur because of a lack of therapists fluent in other languages, such as Vietnamese.

That, in addition to the fact that many people cannot afford private-practice therapy, has hurt the state of mental health services in the county, he said.

With a growing immigrant population whose primary language is Spanish, however, the problems are bound to multiply, Gomez-Valenzuela said.