HIV-Prevention Campaign and Smartphone App Targeting African American Men

The bus-shelter installations are difficult to miss--colorful, eye-catching advertisements headlined Love Your Life, Keep It 100 that feature young Black male models and scannable "quick response" (QR) codes that instantly direct smartphone users to an HIV-prevention website. Posters and palm cards bearing the same catchy images and phrase carry the message into barbershops, hair salons, schools and elsewhere throughout New York City's Harlem and South Bronx neighborhoods. "Keep It 100" is urban vernacular meaning "keep it real" or "be honest." And the campaign that has adopted this slang as its slogan has become one of the first marketing campaigns to use QR codes as an interactive tool to prevent HIV/AIDS.

"It's also one of the first campaigns to target young Black heterosexual men around HIV prevention," says Ingrid Floyd, executive director of Iris House, the Harlem-based HIV/AIDS service organization that created the campaign. Black men "are often ignored or left out of the equation in HIV prevention and education," says Larry Bryant, the director of national organizing at New York City based Housing Works.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic has taken a huge toll within New York's Black and Latino communities. One in every 38 residents in Central and East Harlem is HIV positive, compared with more than 1 out of 100 citywide. "East and Central Harlem and the South Bronx have the second- and third-highest HIV rates in New York City," says Floyd. "The highest rates are in Chelsea, which has a large population of gay men. But among African Americans? The highest rates are here." Black women and Latinas account for more than 90 percent of all new HIV infections among women in New York City. And "more than 90 percent of their cases were transmitted through heterosexual contact," says Floyd, whose agency was the first in the nation to address the needs of women living with HIV/AIDS. "But we didn't find any programs that were targeting heterosexual men. There is always the responsibility on women to negotiate condom use. We wanted to change that."

Until now, "There hasn't been much progress in reaching young straight Black men," Bryant says. "A disconnect remains between how we use technology and how to reach those young men." To help close this disconnection, Iris House created Keep It 100 to target 18- to 24-year-old straight men as well as MSM. "The goal was to increase condom use, HIV testing and hopefully visits to Iris House and one of our prevention programs," Floyd says. The campaign is funded by a one-year grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

 

Smoking Cessation More Challenging for Underprivileged

New research finds that quitting smoking is doubly hard if you are poor and uneducated. Researchers from The City College of New York followed smokers from different socioeconomic backgrounds after they had completed a statewide smoking cessation program in Arkansas. After a program of cognitive-behavioral therapy, either with or without nicotine patches, underprivileged and those from higher social economic backgrounds were able to quit at about the same rate. However, as time progressed, a significant number of the underprivileged returned to smoking. Those with the fewest social and financial resources had the hardest time staving off cravings over the long run. The study is titled Socioeconomic Disparities in Community-Based Treatment of Tobacco Dependence, published in the American Journal of Public Health.

“The poorer they are, the worse it gets,” said clinical psychologist Christine Sheffer, Ph.D., who directed the program. Shaffer discovered smokers on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder were 55 percent more likely than those at the upper end to start smoking again three months after treatment. By six months post-quitting, the probability of their going back to cigarettes jumped to 2-1/2 times that of the more affluent smokers.

As part of the study, Sheffer and her colleagues noted that overall, Americans with household incomes of $15,000 or less smoke at nearly three times the rate of those with incomes of $50,000 or greater. Smoking is still the greatest cause of preventable death and disease in the U.S. today, noted Sheffer. “And it’s a growing problem in developing countries.” Sheffer believes there are several reasons why it may be harder for some to give up tobacco permanently. Stress is a common reason for nicotine addiction. Unfortunately, those on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale suffer more hardships than those at the top, in the form of financial difficulties, discrimination, and job insecurity, to name a few. And for those smokers who started as teenagers, they may have never learned other ways to manage stress, Sheffer said.

Read more on the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America website. Read more on MedlinePlus. Read the abstract of the study.

Office of Women’s Health Releases the 2011 Health Disparities Profiles

The Office of Women’s Health presents the 2011 Health Disparities Profiles. The data resource examines key health indicators at the state level for different racial and ethnic populations in each of the 50 states, D.C. and includes the territories of Guam and Puerto Rico. Twenty-two health indicators are presented across key areas related to health disparities among different populations. The tool also ranks the states and juxtaposes the indicators with the national Healthy People 2020 target. These profiles can be used as a reference for policymakers and advocates to identify areas where major health disparities exist in each state.

The data are also available at the county level by searching the user-friendly database. The system provides state- and county-level data for all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories and jurisdictions. Data are available by gender, race and ethnicity—including disaggregated Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander categories—and come from a variety of national and state sources. The system is organized into eleven main categories, including demographics, mortality, natality, reproductive health, violence, prevention, disease and mental health. Within each main category, there are numerous subcategories. The user can select the variables and demographics of interest for comparison across a number of years.

Access the 2011 Health Disparities Profile. Access the mental health category of the user-friendy database.

Putting Training and Talent Together—NNEDLearn 2012

The NNED, supported by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), invites you to participate in its second annual training opportunity, NNEDLearn 2012.  

Based on input from the NNED, SIX training tracks will be offered to build skills in evidence-supported and culturally appropriate clinical, consumer, and organizational practices. With your support, the NNED has continued to thrive as a federal-community partnership geared to addressing mental health and substance abuse issues for those serving diverse communities:

• Committing to Authentic Peer Support Services in Your Organization
• Culturally Adapted Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Hispanics
• Empowering our Spirits Tribal Suicide Prevention Program: The Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training
• Motivational Interviewing
• Strengthening Families
• The Four Cs of Collaboration: Change, Culture, Conflict and Communication

Learn more about NNEDLearn 2012.  Applications for all Training Tracks are now closed. Thank you for your interest.

Recovery from Psychological Distress among Low-income African American Mothers

Survivors of Hurricane Katrina have struggled for years with poor mental health, a study of low-income mothers in the New Orleans area titled Five years later: Recovery from post traumatic stress and psychological distress among low-income mothers affected by Hurricane Katrina, finds. Launched in 2003, the project began as a study of low-income adults enrolled in community colleges around the country, including three in New Orleans. After Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, researchers decided to continue to track the New Orleans-based participants. The sample includes 532 low-income mothers, most of them African American and whose average age was 26, spread across twenty-three states; participants were interviewed eleven months and nearly five years after the storm.

The study found that even after four years, roughly a third of participants still exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress, while 30 percent exhibited psychological distress. Though levels for both conditions were down from the first follow-up eleven months after the storm, they had not fallen back to pre-hurricane levels.

"On average, people were not back to baseline mental health and they were showing pretty high levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms. There aren't many studies that trace people for this long, but the very few that there are suggest faster recovery than what we're finding here," said Christina Paxson, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and lead author on the study. "I think the lesson for treatment of mental health conditions is don't think it's over after a year. It isn't." Due to the makeup of the sample, Paxson cautioned that the study's results cannot be assumed to apply to the population as a whole, but they shed light on natural disasters' effects on a particularly vulnerable group.

The surveys helped rate the women on two signs of poor mental health: psychological distress and post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Researchers measured psychological distress using a series of questions (also in the initial questionnaire) typically used to screen for anxiety and mood disorders, asking about feelings such as sadness, hopelessness and nervousness experienced over the last 30 days. They measured PTSS using a test used to identify individuals at a high risk of meeting the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder; for example, the women in the study were asked how often they thought about the hurricane in the last seven days and whether they had thoughts about the storm that they could not suppress.  

The researchers found that even after four years, about 33 percent of the participants still had PTSS, and 30 percent had psychological distress. Though levels for both conditions had declined from the first follow-up 11 months after the hurricane, they were not back to pre-hurricane levels.

Read more on the Foundation Center website. Read the Princeton University press release. Read the abstract of the study.

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