All Asians, of course, aren’t crazy, and I apologize for the ethnic stereotyping implicit in my title, but it’s hard to avoid stereotyping in diversity-crazy California. Today’s San Jose Mercury, for example, has an article on “Asians Tackling Mental Illness” that is a chain of stereotypes linked together.
Asians are inhibited from seeking help for mental illness by “the pervasive concept of saving face.” Dealing with mental health, said Leland Yee, a former mental health worker, because “the Asian community does not accept it nor understand it.”
Asians, partly because they ignore or hide the problem, have the highest suicide rate among elderly women and the highest rate of suicide planning among 15-to-24-year-old females.
To make matters worse, while there are many potential patients, Asian medical students go into psychiatry at half the rate compared to medical students of other ethnicities.
Bad combination: All those “potential patients” but underrepresented Asian shrinks.
“The family opposes the stigma of mental illness,” said Dr. Francis Lu, the director of the Cultural Competence and Diversity Program at San Francisco General Hospital who conducted a study on Asian medical students. “It is also a less prestigious medical specialty.”
I find this article only step removed, if that, from describing Asians as inscrutable. This is progress?
How many people of recent Asian ancestry do you know who are being treated for mental illness? While my mother’s cousin is an MD shrink, I honestly don’t know an Asian who is getting treatment (although I know several who could use some).
When a Taiwanese friend was having problems in college, her parents strongly discouraged her from getting professional help. They were not unsympathetic to her trouble, but they refused to see it as something that a shrink could help with.
This reluctance to medicalize all problems is not totally bad; sometimes Americans go too far in wanting to medicate away all difficulties. But talking about how Asians stigmatize mental illness even more than the general population does isn’t racist or unprogressive. Keeping this issue unspoken doesn’t help anyone.
Perhaps I’m racist to consider how African Americans are more likely to distrust the medical profession, but it’s a consideration in the additional outreach necessary to ensure that they get health care.
To shrug as Asians let stigma, and blacks let distrust, prevent them from receiving treatment that they need is not “progress” either.
We provide some mental health services specifically targeting asian immigrants and asian americans. In the San Gabriel Valley of LA County where I work there are a lot of mental health professionals who are Asian and a lot of clients. There are cultural stero-types against counseling and mental health treatment that are both similar and different to other cultural prohibitions against being “crazy”. I’m on the net researching this topic for a grant application right now and just stumbled across your sight. Language and cultural competency are a huge barrier to services for every non-English speaking community! But barriers are not an excuse for a lack of services. And any discussion of stereo-types is not stereo-typing in and of its self.
asians are crazy yao is crazy yrang zrang
can anyone help me out. why do alot of asian medical students working in the uk choose a career in psychiatry? Is it due to discrimination? Any one got opinions or any relervant internet sites or articles.
thanks.