There is support, if you’re having trouble. Ultimately, a good therapist will try to understand your world, not make assumptions about it. While I appreciate this article, I think it also does therapy a disservice by making blanket assumptions that therapists don’t understand Asians, or even that a white therapist couldn’t understand. I’m a psychiatrist, I treat a lot of Asian Americans with care, and there are plenty of others in the San Francisco Bay Area. I also know there are a lot of therapists who are able to work cross culturally because they start with “positive empathic regard.” And while I appreciate that something new and difficult may be happening amongst current young Asian Americans, actually the overall suicide rate for Asian Americans as a whole is lower than the general population, as are rates for mental illness. However, this varies by ethnicity, SES, etc.
It’s interesting that self report depressive scores are higher amongst AA’s, but structured interview results pull in a lower rate for depression. Something is happening that is not captured by western classifications of Major Depressive Disorder. This is a real story. My sense as a psychiatrist in the AA community is that AA’s are internalizing a lot of relational conflict and individuation pressure. While they may express on social media, that doesn’t really go deep enough. It really requires relationship face-to-face and IRL, and we haven’t really formed enough community for this. It’s never been perfect, but my sense is it was much better for me in the 80s and 90s before social media. We just hung out and talked about ish. And I started seeing a therapist — an AA woman by the way, who really had no capability of understanding what it was to be an AA man, because she operated from a psychoanalytic framework. I personally operate from a more active listening, related perspective.
The questions of how to be oneself, achieve some kind of “success” in society, and also belong (our deepest need as human beings) — Hint, there are no answers. It’s a process. Youth are especially uncertain, vulnerable and insecure. From that perspective of “i’m not enough yet” all kinds of fears can be blown out of proportion, leading to all or nothing evaluations of self and other. We have a lot of perfectionism to deal with. Learning how to accept and love ourselves as we are is a powerful antidote to what feels like the “annihilatory disapproval” of a culture that doesn’t really see us as substantial or significant.
I could write more, lol, but I”m between patients :)
BUT PS — don’t knock Buddhism. Buddhism is not about emotional suppression. It’s about understanding one’s own suffering and working with it. Check out centerformsc.org for secular approaches to cultivating inner kindness (my website is sflovedojo.org) But yes, as a whole, Asian Americans tend to value emotional suppression — which has costs/benefits.
