Researchers secure funds to create a digital mental health tool for Spanish-speaking Latino families

Cory Cobb, PhD, an assistant professor of health behavior at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, is leading a research team that has been awarded a three-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to create an online platform for the intervention program they developed for United States-based Spanish-speaking Latino parents and their children.

The Latino Youth and Family Empowerment (LYFE) program focused on Nuestras Familias: Andando Entre Culturas (Our Families: Walking between Cultures), an intervention designed to enhance the parenting skills of this group and to prevent substance abuse and other mental and behavioral health challenges among their middle-school-aged children. The study will be conducted in Austin in partnership with a community partner, the nonprofit organization Breakthrough Central Texas, which works with middle and high school students who aspire to be the first in their family to graduate with a degree or certificate.

“Latino youth in the United States, aside from Native Americans, have among the highest rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation across minority groups, and Latino families face significant barriers to accessing mental health services, such as racial discrimination, high treatment costs, language barriers and stigma,” Cobb said.

The COVID-19 pandemic compounded these issues, with Latino youth reporting among the highest rates of loneliness and poor mental health during the pandemic.

The current LYFE-III study builds on LYFE-I and LYFE-II studies that were funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The LYFE-I study was a multi-year, in-person and group format intervention development study during which Nuestras Familias was developed, culturally refined and tested for potential promise to address mental and behavioral health challenges of Latino families. The LYFE-II study was a replication and extension trial of LYFE-I among 240 Latino families in Western Oregon. The current LYFE-III study will digitize the intervention and make it freely available, then assess its effectiveness.

The study to date has found that girls benefited the most with respect to their likelihood of using tobacco products and foreign-born youth benefited the most with respect to the reduction of depressive symptoms.

“This will be one of the first web-based behavioral and mental health interventions for Latino families in the United States, and it could help increase mental health equity for this vulnerable population,” Cobb said.

The research team will refine the intervention based on feedback from participating Latino families and community partners to make it easier to use and more relevant to this population’s needs, Cobb said.

Following the successful completion of the LYFE-III study, the next step will be to test the intervention in a large effectiveness trial among diverse Latino families and across diverse community contexts, Cobb said.