How Social Media Is Helping To Destigmatize Mental Health Among Older Latinx
On a typical day, my mom and dad are relaxing on the couch or on their beds, looking at their iPads or smartphones. Fifteen years ago, they would never be doing this — but retirement and aging has forced them to slow down. These days they’re consumed with Facebook, YouTube, and Whatsapp — and they’re not alone.
According to Pew Research, some of the most significant gains in Internet usage have been among immigrant Latinos and Spanish-speaking Latinos in recent years. While social media can be saturated with harmful aspects and its consumption has been documented as addictive, I’ve experienced how social media has broken down the stigma of seeking mental health support within my own family.
My mother is a petite Mexican American woman with short light brown hair. She has an innocent gapped-tooth smile and a busty chest. By all accounts, she is a good woman. She raised five children and had built a good home. She always had food on the table and went to church every Sunday. She’s too old and fragile to hurt a fly, but just a few years ago, she was the most active woman I’d ever known.
Despite all of these wonderful things that make my mom, my mom — her cutting words and unstable behavior has fractured several relationships, including those with her children. My two older sisters rarely call her or invite her over for a visit. My brother’s wives have also shunned her from their home. The pandemic didn’t help matters either. It’s been at least two years since they have seen my parents.
My mom also has depression and anxiety and is taking medication for it. But it’s difficult to explain my mom’s behavior to people who have always known her to be friendly yet defensive, outgoing but also judgmental, chatty, and very gossipy. Some in her circle call her an outright liar.
But these labels that have been placed upon her throughout the years have been misinformed. Social media has helped to initiate a conversation about mental health within our family that just a couple of years ago would never be possible.
“My mom is bipolar,” my sister, Alicia Cruz, a mental health specialist in San Francisco, said to my siblings and me. “She’s unwell.”
As the youngest in my family, I wasn’t always kept in the loop about my mom’s mood swings. At times, I remember that she would stay in her room for hours, complaining she couldn’t get out of bed because she had a headache. She scolded me from time to time and once chased me around the house with a broom. Nothing I’d call abuse.
“That’s because you were the last one, and by the time she got to you, she was too old and tired,” my brother once said as he reasoned with me about why all of my siblings bore the brunt of her abusiveness and I didn’t.
On Instagram, there’s an account called Latinx Parenting. Their bio states “Crianza Con❤️ y Cultura🌵” which means “made with love and our culture.” They also use the hashtag #EndChanclaCulture.
Chancla means flip flops in Spanish, and in our culture, this is the shoe that Latina moms use to throw at their children when they’re misbehaving. It’s become an annoying stereotype commonly seen in memes and an approved method of disciplining kids.
Latinx Parenting seeks to end the cycle of abuse and talk openly about how the trauma that was inflicted on our parents is passed down to the next generation. My mother was raised by an abusive philanderer who had another family living just blocks away. Perhaps if Latinx Parenting were around when my mom was younger, she would have had some support. But social media is helping them understand their struggles today.
When my parents retired, they moved to a smaller house several years ago, far away from our childhood home in California. My parents have made a new life for themselves, but now and again, my mom gets into one of her depression periods. She doesn’t leave the house for months.
My dad tried to explain to his kind neighbors why they hadn’t seen my mom in weeks, but he didn’t know how to articulate it. He didn’t know how to tell them that my mom was physically okay, but mentally, she wasn’t in a good place.
One afternoon, he limped over to his neighbor’s house with a cane in one hand and his iPad in the other. He showed them a page on Facebook that explained bipolar disorder in Spanish.
“This is what she has,” my dad said as he pointed to the screen.
These conversations about my mom’s mental health were nonexistent just a few years ago. What has progressed during this period is two things: my siblings and I are open about being in therapy, and Latinx social media has become like one big cultural group therapy session. It’s our safe space.
“I do believe social media has helped break down barriers to talk about mental health and to promote certain mental health campaigns such a Suicide Prevention and Awareness and Eating Disorders Awareness,” Ruthie Duran Deffley, a mental health therapist based in Savannah, Georiga, said.
“These campaigns generate awareness and access to resources both online and offline. Social media allows for the quick dissemination of information. It is only problematic for Latinx communities that are not typically online such as older generations or don’t have access to reliable internet such as migrant communities.”
Today, reaching out to these communities who don’t have time to peruse social media because of work and language constraints is also changing — thanks in large part to the next generation of Latinx.
“I believe that access to more mental health services through schools and colleges have allowed younger generations of Latinx to connect with therapists and mental health services,” Duran Deffley said. “It has reduced the stigma of accessing services as they are embedded in these institutions. Culturally, Latin-American families are not encouraged to access mental health services, and mental health diagnoses are stigmatized and/or ridiculed due to lack of education. The prevalence of social media has also helped destigmatize talking about mental health along with Latinx celebrities such as Demi Lovato sharing their own struggles online.”
For the first time, a collective on social media has launched a free pilot program that addresses mental health, specifically for migrant workers, who often neglect to be open about their feelings and stressors.
The program is called “Healing Voices” and will use technology to engage farmworkers and bring them together in virtual support groups to support healing, teach workers their rights, build community connections, and inspire change.
This pioneering program comes at an imperative time for farmworkers, who have faced numerous health and economic challenges during the pandemic.
“Mental health is a health and wellness issue, but it is also a critical workers’ issue that we all must address,” said Mónica Ramírez, founder and president of Justice for Migrant Women. “This program does just that in addressing a critical gap in the farmworker organizing ecosystem focusing on healing personal and community trauma as a needed step in increasing power for farmworkers to be advocates and activists.”
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, approximately 34% of Latino adults with mental illness receive treatment each year compared to the US average of 45%. This is due to several issues, including access to mental health specialists, economic setbacks, and language barriers. My mother has never had a therapist because we could never locate one that spoke Spanish.
Tatania Smith, a mental health therapist in Savannah, Georgia, said she sought psychology as a profession because she saw a “huge need for Spanish speaking therapists who are culturally sensitive.
“I feel that Latino clients struggle with communicating with family about their mental health struggles because ‘Latinos don’t get sad,’” Smith said. Adding that, the Latinos would rather say, “We don’t get depressed. We get a little down.”
In 2017, I was newly married and had moved to a small town in North Carolina. My mother came to see us for the first time during an impromptu visit because, as my brother put it, she was having an “episode.”
When my mother is having an episode, this entails complaining more than usual, irritable, angry, crying, suffering from an array of body pains and headaches, wandering off, manic cleaning, and the worst part, verbally abusive toward others. These episodes typically last a day or so.
I had rarely experienced these episodes because I wasn’t around much. At 17, I moved out to go to college and never came back. Later, as my mom got older, her episodes increased.
I thought a trip to North Carolina would be a great escape. But when she arrived, I quickly realized something was wrong. She began to complain about my brother and sister-in-law, but this part was ordinary — gossiping about others is a natural habit of hers.
While we were in the kitchen, I noticed the toaster was in a different place than usual.
“Did you move the toaster?” I asked her casually.
“Yes, it looks better over there,” she said.
“Mom, you just can’t move things around,” I said as I put the toaster back where it should have been.
“You think you’re all that, now that you are married and have a house,” she said as a matter of fact.
I was stunned and speechless. This was the first time my mother had ever been mean to me. But that wasn’t all of it.
“Don’t you remember your mom locked herself in the bedroom? She was yelling and crying?” my husband asked me recently while we were watching television one Saturday evening. My laptop was prompted on my lap, and I searched for a Spanish-speaking therapist on psychology.com in St. Louis. Finding a Spanish-speaking psychiatrist in this city isn’t easy.
“No, I don’t,” I responded confusingly. “Maybe I wasn’t there when that happened?”
“You were right there with me on the other side of the door,” he said.
“I remember her wandering around the backyard, near the woods, one night, draped in my childhood blanket. I also remember her on all fours, cleaning the kitchen floor, but that’s it.”
Had I blocked out my mother’s emotional fit from just a couple of years ago?
I had a psychoanalyst for years in New York who told me it was healthy to have boundaries with toxic relatives. Boundaries in Mexican families? That’s impossible, I thought.
But my sisters were able to have boundaries with my mom. They created a wall to keep her out and away from their own families. I categorized her behavior as if it was no fault of her own. She was a victim of abuse. She didn’t know any better.
It’s been three years since my mom insulted me in my kitchen in North Carolina. Since then, she’s been taking medication for depression and anxiety regularly. She and my dad came to stay with us in St. Louis after a year of being apart because of the pandemic.
Everything seemed fine until recently, when she became increasingly anxious. She would leave the house and not tell anyone. She’d call my brother saying she didn’t want to be in St. Louis anymore, telling him I wasn’t letting her do anything. She said to him that she missed her grandkids and wanted to see them.
While she was on the phone, I looked at her medication box and noticed she was out of Sertraline (a depression and anxiety medication). My therapist suggested I take her to an urgent mental health clinic to get her a new prescription.
It’s been almost a month since she inadvertently got off her medication. So now, every day, I kindly make sure she takes her pills. I try not to make a big deal about it. Together we load her medication box while we laugh and watch #hispanicmemes on TikTok.
