Understanding the Potential of Digital Interventions to Address Mental Health Needs of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community: A Mixed Methods Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Mental health concerns are a significant issue among the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community, but community members can face several unique challenges to accessing appropriate resources. OBJECTIVE This study investigated the mental health needs of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community, and how mental health digital therapeutics, such as apps, may be able to support these needs. METHODS Ten members of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community participated in a focus group and survey to provide their views. Participants were members of the Center on Deafness Inland Empire team, which comprises people with lived experience as members of and advocates for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community. RESULTS Findings identified a spectrum of needs for digital therapeutics including offering American Sign Language and English support, increased education of mental health to reduce stigma around mental health, direct communication with a Deaf worker, and apps that are accessible to a range of community members in terms of culture, resources required and location. CONCLUSIONS These findings can inform the development of digital mental health interventions and outreach strategies that are appropriate for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community.

Litter origins, accumulation rates, and hierarchical composition on urban roadsides of the Inland Empire, California

Urban areas are the primary source of human-made litter globally, and roadsides are a primary accumulation location. This study aimed to investigate how litter arrives at roadsides and determine the accumulation rate and composition of roadside litter. We monitored select roadsides in the Inland Empire, California, for litter abundance (count) and composition (material, item, and brand type). Receipt litter with sale time and location information was used to investigate whether wind, runoff, or human travel were dominant transport agents. Only 9% of the receipts could have experienced runoff, and wind direction was not correlated with receipt transport direction. However, human travel and receipt transport distances were similar in magnitude and distribution, suggesting that the displacement of litter from the place of purchase was predominantly affected by human travel. The median distance receipts traveled from the sale location to the litter observation location was 1.6 km, suggesting that most sources were nearby to where the litter was found. Litter accumulation rates were surprisingly stable (mean 40,349 (33,255-47,865) #/km/year or 1170 (917-1447) kg/km/year) despite repeated cleanups and the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. A new approach was employed to hierarchically bootstrap litter composition proportions and estimate uncertainties. The most abundant materials were plastic and paper. Food-related items and tobacco products were the most common item types. The identified branded objects were from the primary manufacturers (Philip Morris (4, 2-7 %), Mars Incorporated (2, 1-3 %), RJ Reynolds (2, 1-3 %), and Jack in The Box (1, 1-3 %)), but unbranded objects were prevalent. Therefore, identifiable persistent labeling on all products would benefit future litter-related corporate social responsibility efforts. High-resolution monitoring on roadsides can inform urban litter prevention strategies by elucidating litter source, transport, and accumulation dynamics.

Iraqi Refugees in the United States

There are numerous and trenchant accounts of the tragic and disastrous Iraq War (2003–2011), which focus on its financial, human, and political cost to the US. Less has been written about the human cost to the Iraqi people in the largest displacement in the Middle East since 1948. Few Americans are cognizant that over three million Iraqis, many facing violence due to their cooperation with the US invasion and occupation, fled Iraq and that 124,159 were resettled in the US from 2008 to 2015 after an intense lobbying effort by former aid personnel and veterans. This ethnographic study explores the cartography of belonging for Iraqi refugees within a specific cultural geography—California’s Latinx-majority communities of southeastern California (known as the Inland Empire). The fieldwork in the IE spans a particular geopolitical era of resettlement mobilization, the Great Recession, and the December 2, 2015, terrorist attack in San Bernardino. The attack was immediately followed by candidate Donald Trump’s naming of Arab and Muslim refugees (including Iraqis) as threats to national security. With the mainstreaming of Islamophobia during the presidential election, the United States ceased to be a free space of religious and communal expression. Drawing on seven years of fieldwork with fifty Iraqi refugees, this book is a witness to how the felt sense of belonging—cultural citizenship—is negotiated within the social spaces of work, family, faith community.

Work, Autonomy, Belonging

Iraqi refugees arrived in the US at the onset of the Great Recession, just as the economic base of the Inland Empire—housing construction—had collapsed. This chapter follows several working- and middle-class Iraqi families through their economic difficulties and adjustment struggles. The most pressing theme to emerge in their narrative is the frustration of unemployment. Refugees are not granted entry based on employment eligibility or labor-recruitment criteria, yet refugee-resettlement programs, beginning in the 1970s with refugees from Southeast Asia, have been justified in terms of achieving economic self-reliance. Iraqi youths reflect on the meaning of economic success in America—the “money country”—and worry that the preoccupation with economic success could tear families apart.

“Just Trust Us”

Iraqi refugees arrived in the US as a global diaspora. In the Inland Empire, they were organized along lines of kin/friend networks that mostly overlapped with preexisting religious affiliations. Mosques and churches provided a vehicle for ethnic socialization. This chapter is driven by the question of how Iraqi families would resolve the tension between parents’ reified authoritarian parenting style and youths’ American imaginary of freedom and individual expression. Iraqi youths spent a formative phase of their lives in Iraq before arriving in the US (a 1.5 generation) and possessed the frame of reference to see the contrast between the cultural norms of their Iraqi families and the more individualistic practices of their American peers. While youths sympathized with their parents’ perspective, they appealed to their parents to handle family issues within a dialog of Thiqa-trust.