Mental Health Services for Latino Immigrant Youth and their Families: Identifying Cultural Risk Factors and Examining the Benefits of School-Based Mental Health

Latino youth in the United States are not performing at the same academic achievement levels as their peers and have significant high school dropout rates. To understand this phenomenon it is important to look at the issues that may be directly impacting these youths' well being and indirectly affecting their academic achievement. One important issue is that many of these youth are immigrants or children of immigrants, which makes them particularly susceptible to several cultural risk factors. This project examines the different cultural risk factors that immigrant Latino youth often faced with and how these risk factors can impact well being as well as academic achievement. This project proposes that one way to address these risk factors and improve academic achievement is through the implementation of School-Based Mental Health programs. The implementation of such programs has grown over the last twenty years but there is no single framework for these services and outcome measures are limited. There is much improvement needed in the implementation of School-Based Mental Health programs but with adequate changes they have the potential to an effective platform to address the cultural risk factors and academic achievement issues faced by many Latino youth.