Policies during COVID-19 and their impact on immigrant families' psychological well-being: A critically engaged practice.

INTRODUCTION: The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated, and complicated stressors related to immigrant families' experience with U.S. immigration policies. METHOD: This article uses a critically engaged practice (CEP) framework to examine three policies and their implications for the health and well-being of immigrant families during the COVID-19 pandemic (a) Detention and Removal of Alien Parents or Legal Guardians policy, (b) Order Suspending the Right to Introduce Certain Persons from Countries where a Quarantinable Communicable Disease Exists, and (c) Field Guidance on Deportability and Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds. RESULTS: Our article presents a CEP framework to empower clinicians in integrated healthcare settings to better understand and communicate policies with their patients. DISCUSSION: Policy-informed CEP asks clinicians to (a) remain current with policy change; (b) have the ability to interpret policy and or policy change to clients; and (c) be aware of not only the primary effects of policy on the family but also the secondary impacts to their system. Clinical implications are provided. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Daily discrimination, church support, personal mastery, and psychological distress in black people in the United States.

OBJECTIVE: This study used the stress process model to test the mediating effects of personal mastery and moderating effects of church-based social support on the relationship between daily discrimination and psychological distress across three age groups of African American and Afro-Caribbean adults. METHODS: Using a national sample of 5008 African Americans and Afro-Caribbean adults from the National Survey of American Life Study, this study employs structural equation modeling to investigate the relationships between daily discrimination, personal mastery, church-based social support, and psychological distress. RESULTS: Daily discrimination was an independent predictor of psychological distress across all groups. Group- and age-specific comparisons revealed significant differences in the experience of daily discrimination and psychological distress. Mastery was a partial mediator of the relationship between discrimination and psychological distress among Afro-Caribbeans while church support was a significant moderator only among the young and older African Americans. IMPLICATIONS: Together, our study findings provide useful first steps towards developing interventions to reduce the adverse psychological impacts of daily discrimination on African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. Intervention efforts such as individual psychotherapy aimed to improve Afro-Caribbean individuals' sense of mastery would be a partial solution to alleviating the adverse effects of discrimination on their psychological health.

The Grieving Process of Opioid Overdose Bereaved Parents in Maryland.

In recent years, the opioid epidemic in the United States has garnered attention due to the increasing number of fatal overdoses. Research on overdose death has increasingly focused on the psychological impacts of drug-related bereavement and disenfranchised bereavement. This study aims to contribute to the growing body of emergent literature on drug death bereavement, by exploring the experiences of parents whose children passed away due to opioid overdose. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with six parents living in the state of Maryland who had an adult child die from opioid overdose two or more years prior to the study. Data was analyzed using thematic analysis. Themes that emerged included the grieving process, stigmatization, and social support. While overall adaptation levels varied among participants, all participants reported positive and negative outcomes related to their experience of grief and loss. Implications for clinical practice and intervention are discussed.