The COVID-19 pandemic will have widespread health, economic, and psychological consequences. Reports indicate the Latino community is particularly vulnerable to the economic and health risks of this pandemic as a consequence of systemic oppression. Latina mothers, in particular, are navigating the pandemic from their racialized, gendered, and classed positions while caring for children and families. These factors are likely to have a significant psychological toll. The sample consisted of 70 Latina mothers. The majority of the families (72%) contained at least one employed adult, of which 91.7% were essential workers. Factors associated with stress, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms during the initial March 20 to June 1, 2020, California “shelter in place” mandate were assessed via phone survey using validated measures and Likert-scale items created for the study. Receipt of the federal stimulus check on stress, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms was also assessed. Due to the pandemic, 52.7% of the mothers reported being forced to engage in economic cutbacks. Mothers’ experiences of stress during the outbreak stem from worries about themselves contracting the virus and making economic cutbacks. Economic cutbacks were also associated with greater reports of depressive and anxiety symptoms. Receiving the stimulus payment did not reduce economic cutbacks, contract worries, stress, or depressive and anxiety symptoms. Findings highlight the pandemic’s immediate economic toll on Latino families. Further, these economic implications seem to be having downstream effects on mothers’ psychological well-being, which were not alleviated by the stimulus payment.

Social and economic inequality are chronic stressors that continually erode the mental and physical health of marginalized groups, undermining overall societal resilience. In this comprehensive review, we synthesize evidence of greater increases in mental health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic among socially or economically marginalized groups in the United States, including (a) people who are low income or experiencing homelessness, (b) racial and ethnic minorities, (c) women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) communities, (d) immigrants and migrants, (e) children and people with a history of childhood adversity, and (f) the socially isolated and lonely. Based on this evidence, we propose that reducing social and economic inequality would promote population mental health and societal resilience to future crises. Specifically, we propose concrete, actionable recommendations for policy, intervention, and practice that would bolster five “pillars” of societal resilience: (1) economic safety and equity, (2) accessible healthcare, including mental health services, (3) combating racial injustice and promoting respect for diversity, equity, and inclusion, (4) child and family protection services, and (5) social cohesion. Although the recent pandemic exposed and accentuated steep inequalities within our society, efforts to rebuild offer the opportunity to re-envision societal resilience and policy to reduce multiple forms of inequality for our collective benefit.

BACKGROUND: There is an increased need for mental health providers to be more attuned to behavioral health needs of racial/ethnic/cultural minorities and the role of social milieus. AIMS: We prioritized training and assessing racial/ethnic and cultural sensitivity among psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner students throughout coursework, clinical practice, and experiences in underserved settings. METHOD: Prior to beginning clinical coursework, students completed a course on culturally competent care where we measured their ( n = 26) perception of their ability to be racially/ethnically sensitive providers at the beginning and end of the semester, demonstrating significant improvement. During clinical coursework, preceptors measured students’ racially/ethnically and culturally sensitive clinical behaviors with patients. RESULTS: Sensitivity of students in clinical training significantly improved over a semester of clinical supervision. Our results indicated that placements in underserved settings improved students’ racial/ethnic/cultural sensitivity but only among advanced students. At final evaluation, advanced students in underserved settings self-reported significantly higher racial/ethnic and cultural sensitivity than students not in an underserved setting. CONCLUSIONS: Our data suggest that we can produce more racially/ethnically and culturally sensitivity providers through coursework, supervised clinical practice, and experiences in underserved settings. These data are preliminary, and we plan to follow up these results and replicate this work with other cohorts in future semesters.

The concept of “social homeostasis”, introduced by Matthews and Tye in 2019, has provided a framework with which to consider our changing individual needs for social interaction, and the neurobiology underlying this system. This model was conceived as including detector systems, a control center with a setpoint, and effectors which allow us to seek out or avoid additional social contact. In this article, we review and theorize about the many different factors that might contribute to the setpoint of a person or animal, including individual, social, cultural, and other environmental factors. We conclude with a consideration of the empirical challenges of this exciting new model.

Objective This study aimed to understand how periodic shifts in financial cutbacks and fears of contracting COVID‐19 contributed to children's externalizing behaviors due to increases in maternal stress among low‐income Latina mothers during the first 10 months of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Background The COVID‐19 pandemic caused widespread health, economic, and psychological consequences for families and children. The Latino community is particularly vulnerable to the economic and health risks of this pandemic as a consequence of systemic oppression. The family stress model suggests that these family stressors will have psychological repercussions to parents, and downstream behavioral consequences to children. Method We examined both the within‐ and between‐person impacts of worry surrounding contracting the virus and the economic consequences of the pandemic on maternal stress and child externalizing behaviors. Participants were 73 Latina mothers who completed assessments an average eight times across the first  10 months of the COVID‐19 pandemic. At each assessment time, the mother was asked about worries surrounding contracting the virus, economic cutbacks the family was making, her perceived stress, and her child's externalizing behaviors during a brief phone call. Results Between‐families, higher economic cutbacks indirectly increased child externalizing behaviors through maternal stress. The within‐family model revealed that at assessments when mothers expressed greater worry about contracting the COVID‐19 virus, they also reported greater stress. Further, at the within‐person level, a mother's greater experience of stress was associated with greater reports of child externalizing behaviors, though the indirect association between COVID‐19 contract worry and child externalizing behaviors through maternal stress was not significant. Conclusions Across the first 10 months of the COVID‐19 pandemic, the children in Latino families participating in this research exhibited more externalizing behaviors among families that engaged in more financial cutbacks as a function maternal stress. However, periodic spikes in Latina mothers' fears of contracting COVID‐19 contributed to periodic spikes in stress, which predicted periodic spikes in child externalizing behaviors. Implications Greater effort toward social policy that provides economic support for vulnerable families before periods of increased societal stress and greater protections for workers with limited sick leave and schedule flexibility will help promote resilience to future crises among low‐income Latino families.