This article is adapted from an episode of our podcast, “Civic.” Click the audio player below to hear the full story.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, San Francisco’s Latinx residents experienced higher rates of infection and deaths, and greater losses of income and homes than did other ethnic groups.
“We lost our jobs. A lot of people lost families, friends,” said Connie Rivera, who owns and operates two Mission District stores with her husband. “The most hard part was the mental. We were not prepared for any of this.”
The resulting trauma led to widespread depression and anxiety. Then Adrian Aguilera, an associate professor in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF, asked Rivera and several others to test a new mental health therapy requiring Spanish-speaking patients to use an app and connect with trained coaches chosen from their community.
“We wanted to do technology-based stuff, but then also bring in supporters to be a cheerleader and understand your lived experience,” Aguilera said.
This “Civic” episode includes accounts from people involved in grassroots efforts to heal the pandemic-related mental health crisis in San Francisco’s Latinx community in partnership with UCSF psychiatric researchers trying a new approach for Spanish-speaking patients.
It wasn’t just Mission residents who were suffering. A study published in the Cognitive Therapy and Research journal in 2021, reported that 40% of Latinx respondents across the country felt increased pandemic-related anxiety or depression, compared with only 29% of white respondents. A study published in 2020 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that Latinx people experienced higher COVID-19 related trauma, substance use and suicidal thoughts than did white people.
Despite evidence of a need for mental health support, people from Latinx communities generally avoid professional therapy because of culturally ingrained stigma, and a lack of language accessibility and cultural competency in the healthcare system, said Paul Flores, a local artist, playwright and educator.
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“Often, explanations for our children’s problems — whether depression or anxiety — put the blame on the parents without knowing what the parents are really struggling with,’” Flores said. “If you’re not an immigrant, you don’t know what this parent is going through.”
In May 2021, Flores became alarmed by the mental health crisis gripping his community and decided to share what he was seeing with public health and government policy workers. He began by approaching volunteers at the Mission Food Hub food bank to form Somos Esenciales — We Are Essential.
The group conducted dozens of interviews, collecting stories from Latino immigrant laborers and Mission neighborhood residents. The work culminated in a short documentary and a report describing the community’s mental health decline, what they did to cope, and recommendations to improve their well-being.
These actions led to an invitation to present their findings at a UC Berkeley Latinx mental health conference. That’s when Aguilera approached the group with his idea of combining a mental health app with peer support for Spanish-speakers.
“I grew up in Chicago, in a Mexican neighborhood very much like the Mission,” Aguilera said. “So that is the reason I came into this work — to provide mental health support for people that look like my family, like my community.”
Aguilera and his research team will train coaches and assess the app’s success rate for easing symptoms of anxiety and depression over the next two years. The project has received accolades from the White House. In June, a blog post by the Office of Science and Technology Policy spotlighted Somos Esenciales, UCSF and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital for researching “digital mental health solutions in resource-limited settings that emphasize cultural and linguistic inclusivity.”
The project is also offering more than just mental health therapy, said Aguilera. It’s enabling coaches-in-training, like Connie Rivera, whose childhood aspiration was to be a psychologist, to achieve a deeper sense of fulfillment.
“We thank the creator for letting us be here to help others,” she said. “If we can help somebody change for a better life in terms of mental health, we will do it.”
