Employees of the organization estimate that 90 percent of the elder participants have learned about and decided to use counseling services at the government-funded Behavioral Health Department. Because many Hmong elders cannot read or write, many of them don’t know about or understand what the department does. Bilingual employees at the center are helping to explain these things to the elder members. What’s more, there are no words in Hmong for “mental health services,” “stigma,” or “post traumatic stress disorder.” So, the cultural center’s employees have learned to translate these concepts for the elders.
Finally, the Behavioral Health Department’s partnership with the Hmong Cultural Center is also helping mental health professionals to better understand traditional Hmong values and perspectives, so that these professionals can offer trauma outreach in an ethnically sensitive way. The Health Department now offers group therapy sessions in the forms of social gatherings like potlucks and field trips for Hmong elders; it publishes outreach fliers and brochures in the Hmong language; and the department is now hiring bilingual Hmong-American trained clinicians.
