Stigma Begone! (In the Name of Love 4)

Her money is more important than my mental health.

So says performance artist Kristina Wong in one of the more heartbreaking moments in Daisy Lin’s wonderful documentary Yours Truly, Miss Chinatown. Perhaps best known for her show Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Wong recalls what happened when she told her mother she needed to see a therapist:

“I remember my mom responded, saying, ‘No, it’s too expensive.” Rather than asking me, ‘Well, what’s wrong?’ she said, ‘It’s too expensive.’ And to me, that became more traumatizing than like, you know, the body issues or whatever stupid things I was going through at the time that made me want to go to therapy. Because it made it seem like, ‘Wow, her money is more important than my mental health.’”

Such painful interactions are all too common between Asian Americans and their parents. Frequently, when Asian American teens and young adults muster up the courage to tell their parents about their mental/emotional issues, the response is one of denial and invalidation. There’s little empathy; instead, the parents shame their sons and daughters for struggling with their issues. Other real-life examples include:

• A medical student, realizing he is deeply unsatisfied with the study of medicine, confesses to his father (himself a doctor) that he feels so depressed, he’s thought about ending his life. The father retorts, “What do you want me to say?”
• A high school teen, under great stress from her parents to attain exceptional achievements in school and extracurricular activities, turns to cutting herself to cope. When her father learns of her violence against herself, he responds by hitting her.
• A recent college graduate, troubled for years by frequent unwanted and disturbing mental images, is told by his devoutly religious mother to just stop thinking them and to pray them away.
• A young woman with disordered eating habits, nagged by her parents through the years about her weight, travels to Asia with them. While on the trip, she is shamed into lying to her parents’ friends that her larger physical size is due to pregnancy.

Perhaps you can identify with one of these situations. Or maybe you’ve just wondered if you should talk to someone trained in helping people work through their personal issues. If you’re an Asian American, chances are that your family of origin never even talked about mental/emotional health and therapy, except for the latest gossip about someone who went “crazy.” (Statistics support this; Asian and Latino parents seek mental health care for their children much less often than Anglo and African American parents, at least in California.) So you may feel alone in your struggles with depression, anxiety, disordered eating, trauma, or addiction.

Please believe me: you’re not alone. You’re never alone.

More and more Asian Americans are courageously stepping forward to shatter the oppressive, stigmatizing silence of our ancestral cultures. They are telling their stories of depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, bipolar disorders, eating disorders, PTSD from abuse or bullying, addictions to substances or sex or gambling, and so on.

Take my friend Julie Kang, for instance. If you’ve been a reader of this Raising Asian American Daughters blog, you met her previously in her guest piece back in May. She grew up with parents who practiced a very “Tiger Mom”-style of parenting. Eventually, as a student at Stanford, her depression took her to the brink of life itself. She writes and speaks about her struggles and her journey toward greater mental/emotional health with a winsome honesty and wit. She recently shared her story with the National Public Radio news affiliate in Los Angeles. (Be sure you listen to the audio interview with KPCC reporter Jed Kim.)

Or take Lisa Lee and Lynn Chen, founders of an online community called Thick Dumpling Skin, which supports Asian Americans who battle eating disorders. (Disclosure: I’ve been privileged to write two posts for their website.) Lisa is a Facebook manager by day who advocates for women’s involvement in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields, and used to serve as the publisher of Hyphen Magazine. Lynn is an exceptional actress, both in drama and comedy, who has also blogged extensively about healthy eating, and serves as a spokesperson for the National Eating Disorder Association. Their award-winning volunteer efforts, recently noted in Marie Claire, arise from their own experiences with disordered eating.

We could go on. My point is this: no matter what you’re struggling with, you’re not the only one who is dealing with that issue. Maybe you’ve even tried to talk to your own parents about it, and maybe they didn’t “get it.” But someone out there does. You’re not alone … ever.

Now, my purpose here is not to dump on parents. They respond the way they do because of their own emotional issues and the cultural values they absorbed growing up. And sometimes, Asian parents do surprise us by responding to their sons and daughters with amazing empathy and support.

But insights about our parents’ psychological makeup don’t help to lessen the pain and struggle that we’re going through. Here’s something that could be the first step in your healing process: a brief, anonymous, online screening for depression, eating disorders, PTSD, and other mental health issues. The website was set up mainly for National Depression Screening Day (this past October 10), but it’s still functioning. The site also includes links to a variety of resources to help launch your journey toward greater mental and emotional health.

Perhaps you’re reading this, and you feel a stirring in your heart to join in the effort to de-stigmatize mental/emotional struggles. For more info, especially in California, please visit EachMindMatters.org. I’d especially recommend their video presentation, A New State of Mind: Ending the Stigma of Mental Illness, narrated by actress and activist Glenn Close, and also their inspiring blog, whose primary writer is another Asian American woman, Julie Stephens!

How does all this relate to raising Asian American daughters? I want to do my part to reduce the power of shame and “losing face” within both the Asian American community and society as a whole. One day, my kids will be wrestling with their own issues, which inevitably will have at least some roots in my parental imperfections. My wife and I work very hard to foster an emotionally healthy environment, well-attached family relationships, and open and safe lines of communication with our girls. But just as everyone I know could really benefit from therapy, so will my daughters. I hope, by the time they’re old enough and self-aware enough to discern that they could use some professional help, that the Asian American community, and society at large, will actually be encouraging and supportive of them!

My part may only be a small one, a “drop in the bucket” as it were, but many of us Asian Americans are determined to do our part and make a difference – out of love for ourselves, our friends and families, our communities, and the next generation.

And we will prevail.