We always could count on our parents to take care of our health. Healthy food, constant visits to the doctor, braces when we needed them, you certainly can't fault our parents for wanting to take the best care of us. However, in the area of mental health, we find that there is a huge stigma attached to those that outwardly suffer from it in the API community. Mental illness is not merely just dangerous ailments such as schizophrenia but also more benign disorders such as bulimia and depression. For too long, people in our community have suffered in silence. Families have chosen to ignore the problem and put off seeking help. For this reason, an Asian Pacific Islander Mental Health Awareness Month is needed.

         Such a month would entail the distribution of bilingual materials in heavily Asian-American communities as well as talks given by experts and psychologists. Testimony from individuals will also be important to convincing others that mental illness is not a shameful thing and those individuals (and their families) should seek counseling. The people that suffer in our community are varied in age, status and gender by they can be helped by concerned individuals.

          The suicide rate among Asian-American students is particularly high. Under sometimes suffocating pressure from family to succeed, these students turn to drastic means to deal with failure. Exacerbating this problem is the fact that traditional families shun psychological treatment for problems and choose to either ignore the problem or punish it as a sign of weakness or imperfection. A rather old but still relevant study by Stanley and David Sue (See here) explored the relationship between Asians and their families and how it relates to suicides in the community. The results were not surprising. Not only is there a punishing stigma attached to mental illness (noted by the words used for such people in their native languages), but if Asian-Americans actually do attempt to find help, they look to friends and family first rather than institutions that could better provide for their needs. This is still relevant more than 20 years later. New generation, but old issues still remain. The fact that little progress has been made in this area is something that needs further review. Additionally, academic pressure applied by the family lead students to despair over less than perfect grades and look for destructive outlets to vent.

          So are our families killing us? Well not really. As I said before, the family unit is very important to Asian-Americans. The legacy of saving and sacrificing for future generations is the reason why many of us are in college right now. This is why I believe that we need to work at breaking the stigma on mental illness in our community. When these people that suffer lash out violently, they not only hurt themselves, but also their families. In fact, there are many tragic cases of depressed individuals killing their spouses and children due to money and family troubles. Sadly, as we look at the writing of Jiverly Wong the shooter in the Binghamton massacre, we see very clear signs of illness. Paranoia, delusions of grandeur, the letter is filled with a laundry list of disorders.

         As a student of Binghamton University, I felt compelled to write about this topic. A mentally ill individual, who showed many clear signs of distress lashed out in the most despicable way imaginable. He took from us friends, colleagues and members of our University. Could this man have gotten help? Could his parents known the warning signs and intervened? We will never know, but if we can we encourage just one student to seek counseling, or one depressed individual that there is a better way, then this exercise will not be one of futility.

Source:
Sue, David and Stanley. Cultural factors in the clinical assessment of Asian Americans. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1987