DIA offers help
Immigrants with disabilities seek TC services
by Mahad Abdi
Immigrants with disabilities arrive in
this country
seeking a new life while burdened with physical and sometimes mental
challenges. These challenges may cause immigrants to have low self-esteem
and hamper their ability to succeed in their new homeland. But these
immigrants also know that they are lucky in coming to this country
where they can get better health and education, and can become contributing
members to the community.
People with disabilities often lack access to needed services and
support. For immigrants with disabilities, especially immigrants who
have been victims of torture and ethnic cleansing, and who struggle
with negative biases within their own culture toward disability, it
is a courageous act to step forward and ask for help. Many of their
disabilities are either birth or war-related. Some of these disabilities
are physical including amputees, those born without limbs, the blind
and the deaf. The rest of the disabilities are mental including treatable
emotional ailments such as depression and culture shock. Many of these
immigrants have language barriers as well and do not speak English.
African immigrants, as a whole, have many social and cultural barriers
to quality health and health care. Mental illness, especially depression,
is almost never diagnosed or treated since there is no understanding
what it is. There is also major stigma associated with immigrants who
have symptoms of mental illness.
At a recent Somali town hall meeting on health issues, depression,
STD, tuberculosis, obesity, heart disease, diabetes and interpersonal
violence were most often cited as problems that need addressing in
a culturally sensitive manner within the community. In the discussion,
Somali doctors also cited health education as a barrier to better health
and treatment. Proper use of medication, for instance, was cited as
a problem for many immigrants. Once diagnosed and given medication,
rarely is there appropriate communication or understanding about the
pharmaceutical treatment modes such as taking one pill daily at the
same time for 10 days or taking one pill in the morning and one pill
in the evening for a week.
In addition to the numerous reasons why disabled immigrants do not
receive or have access to proper health education and care is the issue
of what health professionals in the Twin Cities metropolitan area know
and understand about disabled immigrants. We know that Ramsey and Hennepin
County Public Health Departments have Somali-born or Somali-speaking
health education staff, but we are unsure of staff availability for
the other five metropolitan area counties. We believe that if the major
health plans, hospitals and clinics that serve disabled immigrants
or that may serve them knew about the Disabled Immigrant Association
(DIA) then our participants would get better access and a higher quality
of care.
By utilizing our collective cultural knowledge and partnerships with
local healthcare organizations, DIA will work to reduce health disparities
among the disabled immigrant community by providing much needed information
and education. For more information (612) 824-7075 or link to www.dialink.org ![]()
