This Dallas nonprofit aims to help with mental health needs in Latino community and end its stigma

Throughout the pandemic, Cruz Rivas noticed that her 13-year-old daughter began isolating herself from the rest of their Pleasant Grove family.

“She would hide away in her room in the dark,” Rivas said in Spanish. “I started to worry. She would fight with her brother. She wouldn’t listen to us.”

Rivas later found out that her daughter even contemplated taking her own life. But even after taking the teen to an area hospital for counseling, Rivas said her daughter would not open up.

Then she met Christine Román, who talked to them about a mental health project that she was working on and offered to help Rivas’ family. Román talked with the teen and — after building up trust — got her to open up about what she was going through while connecting the family to support groups.

“(My daughter) now tells me, ‘Mami, I want to help other people, and I don’t want others to suffer as I did,’” Rivas said.

Pleasant Grove ranks high for “behavioral health” hospital patients, according to Community Does It, a new nonprofit that’s trying to address mental health needs for the area’s Latino population.

Román, one of the group’s founders and its board chair, said the idea for the nonprofit developed after a series of focus groups made up of community members and educators in March. Many were concerned about the “big need” for more access to mental health support systems for themselves and their children.

Families spoke to her about their children’s struggles with bullying, depression, building social relationships and self-harm. On top of that, many are dealing with anxiety, a sense of isolation or even loss of family members because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number of youths going to emergency rooms in the country for suspected suicide attempts has seriously increased during the pandemic, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Teenage girls alone showed a 51% increase in emergency room visits in early 2021 compared to the same period in 2019.

For Latino communities, mental health is a topic often overlooked or met with shame and stigma, Román said. Pleasant Grove, located in southeast Dallas, is more than 70% Hispanic and about a quarter of its population are 18 and under, according to the Census’ 2019 American Community Survey.

And the disconnect between families and services was wide, Román said.

“Pleasant Grove continues to be abandoned by many services and overlooked,” she said. “The need is there; the desire for other organizations to serve is there; and what we provide is that connection.”

In October, Román and other leaders established the nonprofit that provides workshops and support groups for mothers — teaching them how to take care of themselves before taking care of the rest of their families.

One of the nonprofit’s goals is to “end the cycle of silence and not wanting to talk about this and recognize it,” she said. She worried about running into resistance when she began the conversation in the community. But Román found multiple parents who wanted to learn, change and be part of the solution for their children.

They voiced the need for assistance finding resources, understanding what the children are experiencing and navigating the process of finding professional help — all of which is especially difficult for those who don’t speak English fluently or at all.

The organization decided to focus on providing counseling for school-aged children, family education and support programs and connecting or referring community members to resources that already exist.

Because many involved in the nonprofit are also Latino, they are able to relate to the cultures and experiences that can make it hard to approach these kinds of services, group leaders said.

“Mental health is a subject that’s very taboo in our community, especially in the Hispanic community,” said Raúl Estrada, one of the nonprofit’s founding members. “The barrier to get help is sometimes extremely high.”

Often, when other organizations come to serve Latinos, it can be more in a clinical setting, and those trying to help don’t always understand the dynamics “of the culture and how everything is just a little bit different,” he added.

Organizers said they focused on creating a space catered to the community so that families would feel comfortable discussing the importance of mental health and “sit with somebody that’s been through it.”

Community Does It is raising the remaining funding needed to remodel a space that was provided by a donor — located in Buckner Bazaar — in order to fully provide its services. With an already long list of families and children seeking help, Román said they are aiming to be up and running no later than February.