Psychology
calyupsos posted a video that is awesome. Awesome. AWESOME.
But anyway. What I intended to post this morning (not that any of you care now that you've been directed to sex) was this:
Asian American Teenage Girls Have Highest Rates of Depression
The report highlights statistics from the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services (HHS) Office of Minority Health (OMH) and National Asian Women's Health Organization (NAWHO) posing concern.
-Asian American girls have the highest rates of depressive symptoms of any racial/ethnic or gender group;
-Young Asian American women ages 15 to 24 die from suicide at a higher rate than other racial/ethnic groups;
-Suicide is the fifth leading cause of death among Asian Americans overall, compared to the ninth leading cause of death for white Americans;
-Older Asian American women have the highest suicide rate of all women over 65; and
-Among Southeast Asians, 71 percent meet criteria for major affective disorders such as depression-with 81 percent among Cambodians and 85 percent among Hmong.
You can read more on NAMI's website, but this fact has been known for some time amongst community organizers and probably amongst young Asian American women themselves.
From my experience, I think part of the problem is that young Asian American women are told these things, but are not given the tools to identify when they are having problems. Most of the AA women I know probably need counseling, but we have no idea how to know we do. We assume that the pain and the confusion we suffer is "normal," that "everyone goes through it," that it's on the way to "becoming a stronger person." Yes, those things are all probably true. But there is a point at which that becomes more than normal, more than something we can or should handle on our own, and becomes something that burdens our lives irreparably.
I think also that many AA women are not comfortable talking about themselves. I remember how uncomfortable I was during my first counseling session: the woman did not strike me as someone who understood me. She was very nice, I'm sure, but she asked me questions I didn't want to answer, questions that made me cry and I was uncomfortable with this. I didn't want to talk directly about how I felt I was a disappointment to everyone, how I felt like I could never be good enough. I didn't want to talk directly about how I no longer wanted anything, how I suddenly for the first time in my life I lacked ambition and just wanted to be happy. I didn't even want to talk about how I had no idea what "being happy" meant anymore. And, as I discovered, most of my AA women friends felt similarly. None of us liked being confronted with questions that implied, "What's wrong?"
The women I was surrounded by at the time were all trained from a young age to be independent, to prove themselves to the world where they were different both in gender and race, where the prevailing opinion was that we were either weak and submissive or that our parents and culture treated us as inferior. None of us liked thinking that something was wrong - we were intelligent, strong, confident, capable of doing whatever we wanted on our own terms. So of course, though we advocate and spoke on behalf of the women in our community who were suffering from depression, we had no idea how to figure out if we were amongst those very women, for those very reasons. Or quite often, I felt like we were struggling to figure out how our personal lives and psyches met our careers, academics, and professional goals.
Many of my AA friends did see therapists and encouraged me to do the same. I stopped very quickly. I didn't feel comfortable, and in a nebulous way, I believe now that it was somehow related to both gender and race. Even though my therapists were women I never saw the woman that everyone suggested to me because she was known for counseling young Asian American women in a sensitive way. To this day I don't know exactly what that means, but I wish I did. A lot of people that I trusted and loved asked me about my academics; I disliked answering those questions because it was hard to, but at least there was no way to lie about it. Very few of them asked me about my personal life in a way that I felt drew an honest answer out of me. I could answer basic questions with basic answers, but never in detail, and never, I felt, truly honestly. More often, I just started crying and refused to answer at all. At the time I told myself that it wasn't important - whatever havoc had been wrecked upon my spirit was irrelevant, a separate problem. I think I always suspected this was untrue, but I still am not entirely clear on how.
... tl;dr, more information. If we ourselves don't even know when to seek help or a second opinion, there's no way to deal with this problem.
But anyway. What I intended to post this morning (not that any of you care now that you've been directed to sex) was this:
Asian American Teenage Girls Have Highest Rates of Depression
The report highlights statistics from the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services (HHS) Office of Minority Health (OMH) and National Asian Women's Health Organization (NAWHO) posing concern.
-Asian American girls have the highest rates of depressive symptoms of any racial/ethnic or gender group;
-Young Asian American women ages 15 to 24 die from suicide at a higher rate than other racial/ethnic groups;
-Suicide is the fifth leading cause of death among Asian Americans overall, compared to the ninth leading cause of death for white Americans;
-Older Asian American women have the highest suicide rate of all women over 65; and
-Among Southeast Asians, 71 percent meet criteria for major affective disorders such as depression-with 81 percent among Cambodians and 85 percent among Hmong.
You can read more on NAMI's website, but this fact has been known for some time amongst community organizers and probably amongst young Asian American women themselves.
From my experience, I think part of the problem is that young Asian American women are told these things, but are not given the tools to identify when they are having problems. Most of the AA women I know probably need counseling, but we have no idea how to know we do. We assume that the pain and the confusion we suffer is "normal," that "everyone goes through it," that it's on the way to "becoming a stronger person." Yes, those things are all probably true. But there is a point at which that becomes more than normal, more than something we can or should handle on our own, and becomes something that burdens our lives irreparably.
I think also that many AA women are not comfortable talking about themselves. I remember how uncomfortable I was during my first counseling session: the woman did not strike me as someone who understood me. She was very nice, I'm sure, but she asked me questions I didn't want to answer, questions that made me cry and I was uncomfortable with this. I didn't want to talk directly about how I felt I was a disappointment to everyone, how I felt like I could never be good enough. I didn't want to talk directly about how I no longer wanted anything, how I suddenly for the first time in my life I lacked ambition and just wanted to be happy. I didn't even want to talk about how I had no idea what "being happy" meant anymore. And, as I discovered, most of my AA women friends felt similarly. None of us liked being confronted with questions that implied, "What's wrong?"
The women I was surrounded by at the time were all trained from a young age to be independent, to prove themselves to the world where they were different both in gender and race, where the prevailing opinion was that we were either weak and submissive or that our parents and culture treated us as inferior. None of us liked thinking that something was wrong - we were intelligent, strong, confident, capable of doing whatever we wanted on our own terms. So of course, though we advocate and spoke on behalf of the women in our community who were suffering from depression, we had no idea how to figure out if we were amongst those very women, for those very reasons. Or quite often, I felt like we were struggling to figure out how our personal lives and psyches met our careers, academics, and professional goals.
Many of my AA friends did see therapists and encouraged me to do the same. I stopped very quickly. I didn't feel comfortable, and in a nebulous way, I believe now that it was somehow related to both gender and race. Even though my therapists were women I never saw the woman that everyone suggested to me because she was known for counseling young Asian American women in a sensitive way. To this day I don't know exactly what that means, but I wish I did. A lot of people that I trusted and loved asked me about my academics; I disliked answering those questions because it was hard to, but at least there was no way to lie about it. Very few of them asked me about my personal life in a way that I felt drew an honest answer out of me. I could answer basic questions with basic answers, but never in detail, and never, I felt, truly honestly. More often, I just started crying and refused to answer at all. At the time I told myself that it wasn't important - whatever havoc had been wrecked upon my spirit was irrelevant, a separate problem. I think I always suspected this was untrue, but I still am not entirely clear on how.
... tl;dr, more information. If we ourselves don't even know when to seek help or a second opinion, there's no way to deal with this problem.