MENTAL HEALTH TABOO
Fighting ‘ghosts,’ superstitions in Asian-Canadian communities,
It’s an unspoken rule for many families in the Asian diaspora — mental health is taboo, so don’t bring it up at the dinner table.
“It was taught to me that it only affected weak people,” said Lindsay Wong, 31, who grew up in a Chinese-Canadian household in the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam. Her family went to tremendous lengths to hide her grandmother’s schizophrenia, not to mention her aunt’s psychotic break, which prompted an eight-hour standoff with police and shut down Vancouver’s Ironworkers Memorial Bridge on Canada Day in 2008 as she threatened to jump. Her mother, deeply superstitious, blamed it all on the “woo-woo.”
“There was this horrible shameful secrecy about it. It was always blamed on ghosts, or possessions,” said Wong, author of a 2018 memoir called The WooWoo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family.
So it’s not surprising that young people in the Asian diaspora are creating new ways to reach peers who experience anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses through modes of communication favoured by millennials like text messaging and Facebook groups.
In Vancouver, the Colour Project aims to reach people of all backgrounds who are struggling with their mental health. Users will enter their cellphone numbers into an online portal, which is about to go into beta testing, and one of 10 trained volunteers from diverse backgrounds will reply by text.
Founders Ian Wong, 29, a dentistry student, and business analyst Amanda Feng, 28, were motivated to help other people after experiencing anxiety and depression themselves, and helping other friends and family go through similar things.
“Every day (we) experience another bout of anxiety … it gives us the power and the courage to continue on to build the Colour Project so that we can help individuals out there who may be struggling and don’t know who to turn to for help,” said Wong.
Diaspora communities aren’t well reflected in mainstream mental health campaigns like the annual Bell Let’s Talk.
There are some mental health resources for immigrant communities, such as a B.C. Psychological Association workshop in both English and Mandarin on how to be a mental health ambassador scheduled for February in Richmond, B.C.
But there’s not a lot of research about how members of the Asian diaspora deal with mental health issues, says Betty Yeung, 27, who completed her master’s thesis on the topic this year.
Her paper, published in December by the University of Ottawa, focused on five second-generation Chinese-Canadian women living in “a city in Eastern Canada” and their attitudes toward mental health. Yeung did not specify their location to ensure anonymity.
All five had positive attitudes toward counselling for their mental-health issues, but said they would keep it a secret from their parents.
Yeung, now a counsellor at the WAVAW Rape Crisis centre in Vancouver, said her work shows how difficult it is for second-generation immigrants to battle the shame associated with mental illness in two cultures.
“They don’t just face the stigma associated with mental health in Canada, but often there is also a lot of stigma within the family, and that usually becomes internalized,” she said.
It can lead to feelings of shame, guilt, self-loathing and esteem issues. Anonymity “helps with one aspect of that barrier to counselling and services.”
Two months ago, Alex Nguyen, 24, and Garfield J. Franco, 25, were fresh out of university when the San Francisco Bay Area friends got the idea to build off the wildly popular Facebook group Subtle Asian Traits and foster a new group, Subtle Asian Mental Health Support.
At first, it was like many other online groups — a place for people to rant about their struggles — but during a manic episode that provided a burst of energy, Franco, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder last year, decided to draft 10 rules to make the online environment more supportive.
No. 3 makes it clear “this is purely an Asian space,” because “mental health is serious in our communities.” And No. 8 discourages dismissive and insensitive comments like, “Hey, I had it worse than you,” and “What do you have to be so sad about?”
More than 12,000 people from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and other countries have since joined the group.
They post heart-wrenching stories such as students who feel a sense of worthlessness because they don’t meet academic expectations and as young adults whose parents threaten to disown them if they move out before marriage. Some people disclose a mental health diagnosis, while others are simply looking for validation and support.
A group of 19 moderators, who live in different time zones, screen posts as they come in, flagging ones that contain sensitive content and weeding out those that are unsupportive. About 80 per cent of the moderators work in the mental-health field.
Like Feng and Wong’s the Colour Project, Subtle Asian Mental Health Support relies solely on volunteers. It has been a humbling experience, said Nguyen.
“We occasionally get messages from people saying, ‘I probably would have left the face of the Earth today but I didn’t, because this group was here.’ ”
In Edmonton, moderator Teresa Chen points to the group’s sudden popularity as proof of the huge gap in mental health programs specifically aimed at youth of Asian descent.
“This is a space where individuals identifying as Asian are able to be vulnerable about something that traditionally has been unacknowledged or heavily misunderstood in our communities,” said the 22-year-old, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Alberta.
“The truth is that mental health illnesses do not discriminate.”
Franco, Nguyen and the Subtle Asian Mental Health Support team ultimately hope to create a non-profit to help the Asian community tell their mentalhealth stories, as well as tackle issues ranging from the changing face of Chinatowns to astronaut families, where parents send their children to western countries to study or live.
“We’re learning how to unpack years of intergenerational trauma and intercultural differences,” said Franco. “From what I’ve seen, we are the generation who is learning to process it.”
For now, they are working on a how-to guide for youth of Asian descent who want to talk to their families about mental health struggles. For many, it is one of the most daunting things they will ever face in their young lives.
“There was this horrible shameful secrecy about it.” LINDSAY WONG ON HER MENTAL ILLNESS IN HER FAMILY