“Promoting Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors to Address Obesity Related Complications of African Americans with Severe Mental Illness Using Peer Navigators”
(2016 – 2021)
The Behaviors for Healthy Lifestyles (BHL) program is designed to be implemented in mental health settings to address issues of weight management and physical inactivity among African Americans with serious mental illness (SMI). It has been adapted from the existing MOVE! Manual developed by the VA National Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. Adaptation was completed by a community based participatory research (CBPR) team of African Americans with SMI and weight concerns partnered with service providers and researchers. CBPR team efforts were supported by a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD: MD010541-01). The CBPR team met regularly for up to a year conducting qualitative research to complete an adaptation of the MOVE! Manual that represents BHL perspectives and needs of African Americans with SMI. In addition, the CBPR team adapted the program to reflect female versus male preferences for BHL with an administrative supplement from NIMHD. This latter adaptation also considered how gender differences in trauma might impact BHL as it is being implemented in an individual’s community.
This study is funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). For more information contact Project Lead, Patrick Corrigan at corrigan@iit.edu
Below is a table summarizing all COVID-19 related measures publicly available in the PhenX Toolkit, NIH Disaster Lit, and NIH OBSSR Databases. Given the dearth of measures aimed at identifying needs of African Americans with serious mental illness, our group developed and administered a measure to do just that, the COVID-19 Concerns Scale (Kundert et al., in progress). For more information, contact Carla Kundert at ckundert@iit.edu.