Engaging the Faith Community in Designing a Church-Based Mental Health Screening and Linkage to Care Intervention

Abstract

African Americans are disproportionately burdened by mental health issues (e.g., stress, chronic depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder). Upon review of mental health local/state/national data, a highly-engaged faith-based Community Action Board (CAB) raised concerns about the mental health needs of African Americans and addressed mental health as a priority health area in African American Kansas City churches. African Americans tend to experience barriers to mental health services (e.g., limited access, high cost, mental health-related stigma, non-culturally tailored mental health care). African American churches have many strengths that could increase reach, acceptability feasibility, and impact of mental health interventions tailored for African Americans. The CAB conducted a health needs assessment survey (N=463; 11 churches) to identify health concerns and potential strategies to inform the design of a church-based mental health intervention. Using a faith-community-engaged approach, the CAB developed the survey and used its findings to design a religiously-tailored, multilevel mental health intervention focused on prevention, screening, and linkage to care. The needs assessment identified intervention strategies (e.g., church-based screening, stress reduction/exercise programs, pastors promoting mental health) that were: (1) rated as highly important/feasible to implement, (2) included in the intervention design, and (3) successfully implemented in African American churches by faith leaders and university students and faculty.

Co-design and evaluation of a smartphone-based mental health promotion and anti-stigma embodied conversational agent for church-affiliated Black adults

“…These works suggest that church-based mental health initiatives should partner directly with church members and leadership to include religious framings that promote mental health care-seeking. Recently, a 2021 community-engaged survey-based research project stressed the importance of community involvement in the co-development of specifications for a mental promotion intervention embedded within African American faith communities (Berkley-Patton et al, 2021). While this project has not published final outcomes, its findings name the following community-identified intervention components: 1. screening; 2. resource referral; 3. church leader involvement.…”

“…prioritizing religious communities with a high prevalence of mental health stigma should address cultural factors specific to Black and African Americans, such as the racialization of mental illness and dimensions of religious involvement (Rivera et al, 2021). In addition, church leadership should be approached directly to partner with researchers when developing mental health and care-seeking interventions (Berkley-Patton et al, 2021). Doing so may reinforce with congregants that reducing mental health stigma and increasing care-seeking opportunities are missions vital to the organization (R. D. Campbell & Mowbray, 2016).…”

“…The intervention was designed as a series of sessions each comprising of a 10 to 15-minute conversation with Clara, intended to be experienced over a series of days. All sessions were based on my review of the related work (Berkley-Patton et al, 2021;Hays, 2018;Rivera et al, 2021), a self-stigma manualized treatment for the stigma reduction curricula (Hansson et al, 2017), and the Key Mental Health Promotion Intervention Design Principles from phases I-IV of this dissertation work.…”