YOUNGSTOWN — The Mahoning County Mental Health and Recovery Board is offering a new scholarship to Youngstown State University for minority students entering social work and mental health-related fields.

Valerie Burney, community engagement and outreach coordinator for the board, said there is a shortage of minorities in social work and mental health fields.

“This scholarship is directly targeting and encouraging students of color, specifically African-American students, to pursue careers in social work and mental-health services,” she said.

“It helps the clients see other individuals who provide the services that look like them,” she said. “We’re not well represented in the mental-health field and social work.”

Burney was recently hired by the board to connect minorities to services and make them aware of what services are available to them, she said. “If you need services, we encourage you to get services,” she said.

STIGMA

“Lots of black people do not seek out mental-health services because of the stigma attached to it, especially in the African- American community,” she added.

“We’ll see a cardiologist, an endocrinologist, but with mental health, people get concerned, such as, ‘What will they think of me if I need therapy?'” she said.

COVID-19 may have increased mental health issues, she said.

“You have to consider if you experience a (death), dealing with COVID or a plethora of other incidents, especially in Youngstown with violence, it’s been a lot. You may be dealing with grief, and that can turn into anxiety and depression and you are not even aware that this is what I am feeling,” she said.

“The black community may be more likely to talk to a pastor. Religion is big in the African- American community. They may go see a pastor before they would ever see a therapist,” she said.

Burney said blacks sometimes think back to the Tuskegee study, in which the U.S. Public Health Service studied untreated syphilis starting in 1932 by studying the health of 600 black men — 399 of them with syphilis — and withheld the treatment of penicillin from them. Penicillin was the treatment of choice for syphilis by 1943.

“They go back to the Tuskegee experient. That is embedded in some individuals. I won’t be an experiment,” she said.

She also thinks some minorities do not seek mental-health services by wondering, “Do they understand me? Do they understand my culture?”

As a result, there is a need for more minorities to provide these services, Burney said.

SCHOLARSHIP

The Youngstown Chapter of The Links Inc. is helping the board award the scholarship by receiving the applications and selecting the recipient.

The scholarship provides either $1,000 for a full-time student or $500 for a part-time student, Burney said. The scholarship will be awarded in May and can be used starting this summer or fall semester. The scholarship is for Mahoning County residents.

The deadline to apply is April 4, at: https://form.jotform.com/211114215131131.

Jamie Bledsoe, a local real estate agent who serves as Links’ scholarship coordinator and director of services to youth, said the Links is one of the oldest minority nonprofit organizations in the United States, having been founded in 1955.

Links focuses on international and national trends and provides services to youth, such as encouraging minority students to enter the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

She said in communities such as Youngstown that can be viewed as depressed economically, “the need for social services is very important. And unfortunately, we are seeing a decrease or lack of interest in going into that field.”

Some of the reasons are that it is a “hard field” and it doesn’t pay very well, she said. Another reason is that a lot of people do not have a lot of information about the field.

“Having a scholarship to alleviate some of the cost could help promote interest in getting more minorities in the field,” she said.

PANDEMIC

“We’ve experienced a huge need for people with training in social services because of the pandemic,” Bledsoe said.

But there was a shortfall of minorities in the field prior to COVID-19.

She said one stressor of COVID-19 is being displaced from a job and educational opportunities, such as primary and secondary schooling and post-secondary education.

She said when students and parents are home a lot together because of COVID-19, it can create stressors. “How do you manage all of that time?” she said.

Dana Davis, chairperson of the Department of Social Work at YSU, said the percentage of black students in the social work program at YSU is about 20 percent for the bachelor’s program and about 8 percent in the master’s program. In Mahoning County, the percentage of residents who are black is 16.1 percent, according to U.S. Census data.

Davis said the percentage of black residents who need social services is higher than their population in the community because of “institutional racism and oppression in this country. There are always going to be more minorities in need of services, having more barriers to service, having more gaps in services.”

She agrees that blacks frequently do not trust service providers in the health care system.

“So, it’s ideal if they have a provider that would look like them to make them feel like they can trust the process more easily,” she said.