Christine Lee - SS1 - Week 4

In this week’s reading, Attack on the Spirit by the “Rational World” (and Spiritual Recovery from It), by Brett Esaki, talks about Peter Berger’s theory of the "nomas" and analyzing why Asian American use spirituality to recover from the pain in academia. This reading talks about how Asian American Women hesitate to talk about their healing process after damages are done in their mental health. They also mention about some healing tactics they use to maintain themselves, which includes meditation, and getting into religious practices. Thus, the text mentioned that spirituality can be a way to heal from the indictments of academia and the rational world is not actually rational. This reading resonated with me. I know of many Asian American Women go toward Asian traditional religion that can be appealing to them and using the forms of meditation and ritual mantras to calm the mind. I know that American people gravitate towards yoga to calm the mind and exercise their body. But in the recent years, many American people have started to imitate this method for peace.

In relation to this week’s theme, to use ways to heal and recover from the damage done in academia. In “Care Work”, Dariotis and Yoo talks about how the complexity of Asian American women professors who have performed care work in the academy as a form of labor to support emotional well-being of students and colleagues. Care work is defined as a sociological construct defined as the physical and mention work to nurture individuals. Additionally, Asian American women faculty tend to fill the gaps for many infrastructure needs on campus. One might even consider some students need care work to succeed in school. As in the academy, the pressure and struggles starts to creep up on students and faculty. It would be best for the institutions to recognize the hard work Asian American faculty do that are a high cost to them.

Question: Are there services for faculty to see for mental health problems?

Source:

Blufish. “How to Deal with Mental Health in the Workplace.” AZ Big Media, 25 June 2018, azbigmedia.com/business/workforce/how-to-deal-with-mental-health-in-the-workplace/.