Hawaii bill seeks to prevent suicide in Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations News
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Hawaii bill seeks to prevent suicide in Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations

The Hawaii Senate Committee on Health and Human Services Monday passed a bill that directs the Prevent Suicide Hawaii Task Force (PSHTF) to further focus its efforts on preventing suicide in Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations. Specifically, HB 622 requires the task force to “examine, evaluate, and determine methods to improve education, awareness, support services, and outreach to best prevent suicides in Hawaii, particularly among Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.”

In Hawaii, suicide is the most common cause of fatal injuries. For Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders aged 15-24, suicide was the leading cause of death in 2019. Additionally, the bill found that:

Amending the duties of the task force to focus on Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander suicide prevention efforts is an important step toward addressing mental health needs amongst vulnerable Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities that already experience higher rates of poverty and incarceration in relation to other groups in the State.

Hawaii’s Department of Heath stated that it supports the intent of the bill but requests that the bill be deferred until 2025 because the PSHTF is already working on a strategic plan to prevent suicides that will be delivered in 2025 and is able. The Department of Health stated it would be easier to wait until the strategic report was finished and that “it will be more efficient to incorporate a new component focusing on Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander populations, informed by culturally appropriate resources, than to create an entirely new effort.”

Hawaii Representative, Mahina Poepoe, introduced the bill in January 2023. She stated:

[C]urrent suicide prevention programs either exclude Indigenous populations or fail to understand how colonial history affects their mental health today… It is my hope that this bill will result in identifying the unique risk factors of this population and creating culturally conscious treatment pathways and prevention methods that give our Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders a healthier sense of community and self.

 

THIS DAY @ LAW

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.

Former communist countries admitted for EU accession

On April 16, 2003, the 2003 Treaty of Accession was signed by 10 countries, admitting them for European Union (EU) ascension. After Malta and Cyprus, eight of the ten new EU nations (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) were former communist countries. The signing of the treaty in Athens marked the first time that former members of the Soviet Bloc joined the EU.

Learn more about EU expansion from the organization's website.

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