Week 6 - Yingjun Huang

ASA 002 A01

Yingjun Huang

Week 6

I knew that Asian students in American universities and colleges are facing a lot of stress before reading On Some College Campuses, A Focus On Asian American Mental Health, just not realizing how serious the problem is. The article said that 55% of suicides of Cornell students involved with students from Asian backgrounds and that is quite shocking.

But when we come to think of it, this is nothing that surprising at all. The article itself explained pretty clearly the issue related to it: model minorities, family expectations, peer pressure and some more. I would just want to suggest one reason why we Asian students were reluctant on seeking help.

First of all, we would have never realized that it was a problem. I don’t recall of having educated about mental healthiness back when I was in China, so for over 12 years of my study I didn’t know until recently about what depression is like or what the difference is between depression, which is mental sickness, and simply being depressed, which is temporary and might get shamed on for being wimpy if complains about it; turns out when the symptom comes up, we would’ve never care about it until it gets worse.

Secondly, we got shamed of for asking others for help. We always got feedback from our parents or teachers like “Isn’t it your own problem?” And we went into self-examination process, every single time. The result is when the depression problem comes up and we were like “okay so this might be my own problem as well” so instead of bothering other people we just try to solve it by ourselves, which most of the time just delay the treatment.

The reason why I rambled a lot on this is that I feel like the ultimate solution of this mental sickness problem is to get communication. It’s okay to ask for help after all and the problem gets easier to solve when we talk more about it.

A picture easily showing how mental illness is a problem for Asian American or Pacific Islanders in the US. 

Question:

What if the student is stressed by communication? Like socialphobia.

The reason I ask about this is that I’m that kind of person feeling stressed when I talk to someone. I was lucky because I have friends that noticed this and helped me out from being worse, but it’s still affecting my daily life. Sometimes when we talk about problems we were like “people should communicate about it”, but what if the person that is having the problem tend to restrain from communication?

References:

1. Katherine Kam. (2013) On Some College Campuses, a Focus on Asian American Mental Health. From New America Media, New Feature. Retrieved October 29, 2017.

2. Asian American/Pacific Islander Communities and Mental Health [Digital image]. (2016) Retrieved October 29, 2017, from http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/issues/asian-americanpacific-islander-communities-and-mental-health