Alice Kuang
Section A01
Week 6
I felt a range of emotions as I read through this week’s set
of readings. I felt immediate connection to the topic of mental health amongst
Asian Americans, and simultaneously I also questioned the legitimacy of my own
mental health struggles. Although these readings may be seemingly unrelated at
the surface level, they all present different aspects of mental health, and from various perspectives beyond the
Westernized view. In a way, I feel that this westernization and medicalization
of mental health, as explained in “Pathologizing Everyday Life” and “The
Americanization of Mental Illness”, have attributed to the invisibilizing of
the specific experience that Asian Americans hold in regards to mental
health.
“Pathologizing
Everyday Life” critiques the classifications of daily mental tribulations as
mental illness, which subsequently blurs the line between mental disorders and
mental troubles of everyday life. Thus, this leads to the medicalization and
over diagnosis of mental illnesses. I feel that this is a valid critique, but at the same time, it perpetuates homogeneity, as it relies on the assumption that everyone
experiences the same struggles that create these daily mental troubles. Even though these agree
that mental health isn't necessarily biological and is informed by a person's surrounding environments, they fail to mention important sociological conditioning factors
like race, class, and gender disparities. This critique comes from the western
approach to mental health as mentioned in “The Americanization of Mental Illness”,
which Asian Americans may not find applicable to their experiences.
These readings,
especially “Pathologizing Everyday Life” actually made me question the validity
of my own mental health struggles as a Chinese American woman. Like the Asian
Americans in “On Some College Campuses, A Focus on Asian American Mental
Health," I’ve had my battle with anxiety in high school--when I was unable to
match up to the internalized high achieving, model minority standard that I had
created for myself. I was in the pursuit
of high achievement due to the internalization of the societal
expectations that a dominant power had created for Asian Americans, and my subconscious wanting to rekindle the gender disparities I felt in my family. This feeling of
worthlessness, combined with the culture shock I felt at my new high school
environment (which was majority white), were undoubtedly defining factors of a
lifelong battle with anxiety. Despite these doubts, I don’t want to attribute these sociological factors to just mere mental troubles, nor are they part of my biological weakness. My struggles are my truths. Holding on to these truths, I want to believe that a major
key to understanding mental health is to understand that it’s a synthesis of
the sociological and biological, and that it is not all all, solitary.
Question: How do we effectively combine the hard and social
sciences to better understanding mental health? And specifically, in the
context of Asian American mental health?
References:
Kam, K. (2013, September 13). On Some College Campuses, A Focus On Asian American Mental
Health. New America Media. Retrieved from http://newamericamedia.org/2013/09/on-some-college-campuses-a-focus-on-asian-american-mental-health.php
Watters, E. (2010, January 09). The Americanization of Mental Illness. Retrieved May 07, 2017, from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html
Wasserman, Theodore, and Lori Drucker Wasserman. "Pathologizing Everyday Life." Depathologizing Psychopathology (2016): 7-12. Web.
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