Who actually answered?

Lakeview County Ledger

Health Report Names Eastside the County's Most Distressed Neighborhood. Some Residents Say Nobody Asked Them.

Thursday

The Lakeview County Health Department released its biennial community health report on Tuesday, and one number in it has moved faster than the rest.

According to the report, 21.4 percent of adults in the Eastside neighborhood experience frequent mental distress — defined as fourteen or more days in the past month when their mental health was not good. That is the highest figure of any neighborhood in the county, and more than double the 9.8 percent reported in Northgate, a subdivision on the county's western edge.

The finding was covered by two television stations within a day. By Wednesday afternoon, the county's Behavioral Health Commission had scheduled a special session, and a state legislator whose district includes part of Eastside had issued a statement calling the number "a five-alarm fire."

A neighborhood used to being described

Eastside is roughly 2.3 square miles, bounded on the north by the rail corridor and on the south by the county warehouse district, where three regional distribution centers employ somewhere between four and six thousand people depending on the season. About 44 percent of Eastside adults were born outside the United States. After English, the most commonly spoken languages in the neighborhood are Vietnamese, Somali, and Mixtec.

Residents interviewed for this story described a mixed reaction to the report.

"Nobody here is surprised that people are struggling," said Ana Villalobos, who has run a laundromat on Fillmore Avenue for eleven years. "I could have told you that for free. But I've lived here since 2013 and I've never been asked anything by the county about my mental health. Not once."

Others welcomed the attention. A mural project on the side of the Fillmore Avenue community center, funded last year through an arts grant, was originally proposed as a mental health awareness installation before the design was changed. Community organizers said the report may revive interest in the original concept.

At the same Tuesday meeting, the Board of Supervisors spent close to forty minutes on an unrelated dispute about a proposed parking structure near the county courthouse, which several supervisors argued would worsen congestion on Third Street during weekday mornings.

What the number is supposed to mean

Dr. Priya Raghunathan, a psychiatrist at Lakeview Regional who was not involved in the report, cautioned against reading the figure as a diagnosis count.

"Frequent mental distress isn't a disorder," she said. "It's a survey measure. Somebody said their mental health was not good on fourteen or more days. That threshold was chosen for population monitoring. It doesn't tell you whether a person meets criteria for anything, and it doesn't distinguish a hard month from a serious illness."

She added that stigma remains a real barrier. "In some communities, and I would include several that are well represented in Eastside, describing your mental health to a stranger who has called your phone is not a neutral act."

Supervisor Della Hoyt, whose district includes Northgate, said the disparity demanded explanation. She described a cousin who had struggled for years before finding treatment, and said the county "cannot keep pretending that where you live has nothing to do with how you feel."

How the report was assembled

The figures come from the Lakeview County Community Health Survey, administered between March and May of last year. Interviewers placed calls to landline and cellular numbers drawn from a commercial sampling frame, on weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. The instrument was available in English and Spanish. The average completed interview ran 22 minutes.

Countywide, 4,213 interviews were completed. The department reports a response rate of 28 percent. In Eastside specifically, 61 interviews were completed.

The report notes that estimates for smaller neighborhoods "should be interpreted with appropriate caution," a sentence that appears on page 118 of the 140-page document.

A county spokesperson said the survey methodology had not changed substantially since the previous cycle, and that the department was "confident in the overall picture the data presents."

What happens next

The Behavioral Health Commission's special session is scheduled for the 14th. On the agenda: a proposal to redirect approximately $400,000 in flexible prevention funding toward Eastside, drawn from a pool currently distributed evenly across all eleven neighborhoods.

Two commissioners have already objected, arguing that even distribution is the fairest approach and that a single report should not overturn it. A third told the Ledger she would support the shift but wanted "someone to walk me through where these numbers actually came from before I vote on them."

The full report is available on the county website. The methodology appendix begins on page 112.