Anna Yang
Week 6
ASA Sec 2
“On Some College Campuses, A Focus On Asian American Mental Health” by New American Media, it discusses the mental and health issues that Asian-Americans often face due to being a “model minority” and feeling academic pressures by their family. Furthermore, Asian American college students are at an increased risk for depression, and college counselors have noted that many are extremely reluctant to seek help. Because of this, many have committed suicide.
This article resonated with me a lot because both my brother and my sister attended Lowell High School. In San Francisco, Lowell High School is a prestigious school where students heavily focus on academics. While my brother and sister attended school there, I remembered all-nighters and late night cramming that they had to stay up for to finish the workload assigned to them. Taking multiple AP classes on top of balancing club activities, they were highly stressed. Though my parents did not push my siblings that hard to get good grades, they did mention to work hard. Instead, this made my brother and sister stress upon themselves to get good grades and would often feel disappointed if they got anything less than an A-. Knowing how both my siblings were doing mentally at Lowell High School, I still felt a sense of pressure to apply to attend the high school. However, I did not get in. After that, I felt disappointed in myself and believed that I was not academically as smart as them. This, in turn, affected me mentally because I was always being compared to them and never felt like I had a sense of direction in my life.
Question: How can we stop academic pressures among Asian-Americans?
References :
New America Media. "On Some College Campuses, A Focus on Mental Health." N.P., 13 Sept. 2013. Web. 5 May 2017.
Asian American Students Have Strong Academic Support – But Is It Too Much? |. (n.d.). Retrieved May 05, 2017, from http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/site/ataglance/2017/03/asian-american-students.html
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