Challenges hit close to home for many Asian American youth
By Zoe Weisner, shades Magazine Contributor
In early 2021, I received a text message from Sandra – the daughter of a close family friend.
A seventh grader living in Stockton, California, Sandra is Cambodian American and has a vivacious personality. She never refuses the opportunity to play board games like Monopoly or solve 1000-piece puzzles. We often talk about her dream to move to Los Angeles and become a famous designer; occasionally she confides in me about her turbulent home life.
On this day, I assumed she was reaching out to ask for help with her math homework. When I opened the text, my heart lurched.
“I don’t want to be alive.”
An unspoken crisis
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic – which recently entered its fourth year – the mental health of Asian American youth and young adults across the country drastically deteriorated. Many experts attribute this to not only the isolation and uncertainty that individuals around the globe were experiencing, but closer to home, to the change in attitudes towards Asian Americans, fueled by political rhetoric and the increased visibility of those whose ideologies were based on hate.
Stunned by Sandra’s text, I called her, and we talked for a few minutes. She informed me that she felt trapped at home due to remote learning and that she frequently gets into fights with her grandmother, who reportedly feels as though Sandra has developed an attitude since the beginning of the lockdown. A Cambodian immigrant, Sandra’s grandmother is unfamiliar with concepts like depression and anxiety. She does not understand that Sandra no longer had an outlet from her home life.
After starting remote learning in 2020, the teenager (whose name we have changed to protect her identity) said she spent hours staring at her computer and did not have the opportunity to socialize with friends. I offered generic phrases like “everything will be okay” and “thank you for telling me how you feel” before Sandra ended the phone call abruptly. I frantically called Sandra’s mother, who told me she would speak with her daughter about counseling.
For the rest of that day, I waited anxiously, feeling powerless and afraid that Sandra might take her life.
A recent study by Frontiers – one of the leading research publishers in the world – found that more than three-quarters of Asian-American young adults and adolescents reported that their depressive symptoms increased over the course of the pandemic. And in a New Jersey-based study, its authors found that between 2019 and the first quarter of 2021, Asian Americans faced a 344% increase in hate crimes. These findings indicate that the pandemic has created a particular kind of mental health crisis in Asian-American youth – one that has been ignored due to cultural stigma and a lack of systemic resources.
Mary Her, Senior Clinical Supervisor of the Amherst Wilder Foundation, oversees Hlub Zoo (pronounced loo-zhong) – one of the few culturally specific mental health programs in the country for Asian American students. The school-based initiative is embedded in several St. Paul, Minnesota, schools and tailors its services to Hmong students and their families by employing ethnically matched therapists and clinicians; providing education about Hmong traditions and culture; and working with these families to build their trust in mental health services.
After the pandemic began, Hlub Zoo experienced an uptick of students in need of mental health services, Her said.
“We saw a high need of students who were very depressed, who really struggled with coping through their mental illness and families having a hard time understanding their children,” Her added. “We were up against the mindset of the mental health stigma that lingers within the Asian community.”
Battling stigma, overlooking internalized behaviors
Asian Americans are the least likely ethnic group to use mental health services, largely due to cultural stigma, cost and the pressures of the model minority myth, reports an article in The Journal of Behavioral Health Services & Research. They also are often afraid to “lose face” and do not want to be labeled as weak or abnormal within their families and communities. This explains why many signs of mental health problems among Asian American youth often go unnoticed by parents and teachers. According to Her, these students are more likely to display internalized behaviors, which can include appearing anxious, lacking confidence or struggling with building peer relationships.
“Teachers were saying that they have seen these internalized behaviors for years, and they did not realize these were anxiety and depressive symptoms,” Her said. “Many of the Hmong children that we spoke to were suffering quietly, because oftentimes, in Asian communities, traumatic experiences are not spoken at home openly.
“I would encourage parents to seek out their schools and their districts to find ways to develop these culturally specific mental health services,” Her added. “It takes a whole village to create something like this, and I think parents need to be on the front end pushing for these services for their children.”
Moving forward
Two years after my earlier conversation with Sandra, we reconnected to talk about her schooling experience during the pandemic. She is now a high school freshman with a core group of friends and said she is doing better.
“The worst I ever felt was during COVID,” Sandra said. “My friends didn’t understand what I was going through because they had happy home lives. If I wanted to reach out to the teachers for help, they weren’t very responsive. Sometimes it took days [for them] to get back to me.”
When asked whether she found school counseling helpful, Sandra frowned and shook her head.
“I couldn’t trust the counselors because they reported what I said to my mom, and my mom couldn’t understand my problems. She even yelled at me when I started cutting myself.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear that Sandra’s school’s mental health services were poor. During my sophomore year in college, I had reached out to counseling services after learning that a close relative had suffered from psychosis and tried to take their life. I had stopped eating and clumps of my hair started falling out. I was then told by the school’s mental health center that I would need to wait about a month before I could speak to someone. I was stunned – a month felt like a lifetime. In the end, I never received treatment at school; and I did not feel comfortable speaking to a therapist until my mid-20s.
I often think about those who needed help and couldn’t wait. What happened to them? And why is this issue persisting today?
As I continued to press Sandra about her COVID experience, I could tell that her interest in the conversation was waning. This is a common reaction from many of the Asian American youth I speak with about mental health challenges. Several also were reluctant to share their pandemic experiences, despite my reassurances that they would remain anonymous for this story.
I shifted the focus of our conversation to baking – a hobby Sandra recently has picked up – and a look of relief washes over her face.
She is ready to move on.
Asian American Mental Health Resources
- Asian Mental Health Collective: The Asian Mental Health Collective provides a directory of Asian therapists in the United States and Canada.
- South Asian Mental Health Collective: The South Asian Mental Health Collective provides mental health resources to the South Asian community in the United States.
- National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association: Provides mental health services and resources to Asian Americans and Asian American youth.