ATLANTA — A new study by the Atlanta Women’s Foundation shows metro Atlanta families are struggling with mental health, and several factors are to blame. Housing costs, childcare constraints and access to affordable healthcare contributed to rising mental health concerns, according to the study.
Tyese Lawyer is president and CEO of Our House, an organization that helps connect homeless families with healthcare, early childhood education, job training and housing.
“When people are experiencing homelessness, it’s a form of trauma and it’s exacerbated by a lack of access to certain supports in our community,” Lawyer said. “Being able to have a designated place you know you can go to every night is really about having stability, about being able to focus on other things like education and employment.”
Lawyer said she had seen more children with behavioral challenges and mothers struggling to navigate life. The Atlanta Women’s Foundation called the current experience a mental healthcare crisis.
“They may use the emergency room as a primary source of healthcare,” Lawyer said. “Their children may not be able to attend school or they may experience delays when they first get to school, which means that resources then have to be used to provide remediation services for that child so they can learn on par with their peers.”
CEO Kari B. Love said poverty-driven trauma has held back families, especially in Gwinnett and Clayton Counties, where language barriers and a lack of services stand out.
“The Atlanta Women’s Foundation’s mission is to be a catalyst or change in the lives of women and girls,” Love said. “There’s a lot of concern and need around affordable housing, healthcare and mental healthcare and wellbeing, childcare. Before a woman can get onto a path of economic self-sufficiency, she’s got to become healthier.”
The report found more than half of metro Atlanta renters are burdened with housing costs, including over 60% of renters in Clayton and Gwinnett Counties. The study also found local nonprofit providers were seeing anxiety in around 90% of clients, depression in more than 80%, trauma in more than 75% and suicide or self-harm risk in nearly 40% of people.
Provider shortages, insurance limitations, transportation barriers and a lack of childcare contributed to more than half of frontline nonprofit staff reporting delays or cancellations when people look for mental healthcare, according to the study. Burnout was also factoring into providers being able to offer adequate resources to those in need. A full county-by-county breakdown can be found here.
Love said data from the study showed there need to be more entities helping families in need. She said it will help tailor programs and decide which groups to fund to make the biggest impact. The Atlanta Women’s Foundation planned to offer a fresh round of grants to organizations addressing mental health.
Our House is one of the organizations that has received a grant from the Atlanta Women’s Foundation. Lawyer said connecting families with that foundational building block of housing can ultimately lead to better circumstances.
“It’s important that everyone has opportunities,” Lawyer said. “We’re able to provide counseling, medication management for those with mental illnesses who would benefit from drug therapy protocol. Women in our communities help contribute a great deal to our community and are trying to pave a way towards a brighter future for us all.”