Chicana and Chicano Mental Health: Alma, Mente y Corazón

2. Adolescent Mental Health

2 Adolescent Mental Health T he most prevalent mental health problems affecting Chicano/a youth include depression, anxiety, and conduct disorders. Young Chicano males have a high risk of accidental death, as well as death by suicide or homicide (Aguirre-Molina and Betancourt 2010). Chicanas have higher rates of depression and suicidal ideation and intent than European American and African American peers. Both Chicano and Chicana youth abuse alcohol and other drugs at rates equal to or higher than their European American peers. Yet few epidemiological studies have focused exclusively on the mental health of Chicana/o youth. The Houston School Study (cited in Canino and Alegria 2009) found that Chicano preadolescent children and adolescents ages ten through seventeen were at greater risk for mood and anxiety disorders when compared with European American and African American youth of the same socioeconomic background. The reasons for the higher risk are not clear; however, acculturative stress and family factors are believed to contribute to anxiety and mood disorders among Chicana and Chicano adolescents. The impact of intergenerational trauma and the ways in which exposure to microaggressions and racism, sexism, and classism impacts Chicana/o adolescents have not been studied. This chapter examines the particular psychosocial needs of Chicana/o youth and the protective and risk factors associated with their mental health. identity/ies The most important task of adolescence is to develop an identity and a sense of belonging. Hurtado and Gurin (2004) distinguish between personal and social identities. Personal identity is an aspect of the self that is composed of psychological traits and dispositions that make the individual unique. These traits are fairly stable and are formed within the family. Social identities, however, encompass the aspects of the individual’s self that derive from their knowledge of membership in a particular group, such as gender, class, and ethnicity (Hurtado and Gurin 2004). Moreover, Chicana and Chicano Mental Health 34 race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability at times are stigmatized. While an adolescent may identify with a particular racial, ethnic, or cultural group, she may lack the awareness that her social identity is stigmatized. Microaggressions and overt racism threaten the adolescent’s sense of self (Hardy and Laszloffy 2005). Likewise, in adolescence the increased influence of peers, friends, and nonfamilial relationships, including those with teachers, calls for youth to balance familial and nonfamilial relationships (Falicov 1998). For Chicano youth developmental tasks also include developing a positive identity, as well as learning to negotiate social contexts that often devalue their ethnicity and their parents’ country of origin. The current backlash against Mexicans, whether documented immigrants or not, fosters a hostile social milieu. While both males and females must negotiate multiple identities in adolescence, for girls this process takes place within a larger context that often devalues their gender and is rife with gender violence (GallegosCastillo 2006). The personal and social identities of Chicano males often are racialized and “othered.” Brown males, from the age of thirteen, are feared and viewed in stereotyped ways as gangsters or potential delinquents, irrespective of their class status and home location (Hardy and Laszloffy 2005). For Chicanos and Chicanas identity formation entails developing a sense of self that is gendered, and which negotiates ethnic and racial characteristics and sexual identification and preference, while experiencing varying degrees of marginalization (Hurtado and Gurin 2004). Depending on the home culture, the family’s socioeconomic status, and the youths’ social milieu, adolescents may need to develop identification with two or more countries, value systems, languages, and ways of being. It is quite understandable that Chicana/o adolescents experience massive amounts of acculturative stress, which can potentiate the development of psychological problems (González et al. 2010; Umaña-Taylor and Alfaro 2009). The task of ethnic/racial identity formation may be even more challenging for mixed-raced Chicanos. According to the 2010 census, Latinos are increasingly mixed-race, with parents of various Latino national origins or ancestries (Mexican and Salvadoran , for example) or parents who are European American or members of another ethnic group. In one of my studies of adolescents in the 1990s, more than half of the Latino sample were mixed, and included Mexican and Middle Eastern, Chicano and Asian, and Mexican and African American (Flores-Ortiz 1994). Several of the adolescent girls in another study adolescent Mental Health 35 identified themselves as Blaxicans (Black and Mexican [Flores 2006]). For them, an additional element of identity formation was...