Town hall looks at attacks’ effect on mental health
Anxiety takes toll on Asian Americans
South Bay lawmakers, Asian American community leaders and Bay Area residents led a town hall to discuss the impact of the recent shootings in Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park (Los Angeles County) on the community’s mental health.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a representative of the only Asian American majority district in the continental U.S., kicked off the packed town hall Saturday morning at San Jose City College by expressing his concerns around the spate of hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across the Bay Area and around the nation.
“People are afraid, concerned, and anxious about being Asian American in the U.S, and it’s a fear that’s been building,” said Khanna, D-Santa Clara. “I’ve had people tell me that they’ve never felt more distant from America ... than in these past few weeks.”
Attendees at the town hall heard from a variety of Bay Area community leaders and elected officials, who spoke about the continuing issue of gun violence and ways to cut through the stigma over seeking mental health support, particularly in Asian American communities.
“What people are feeling — the fear, the anxiety, the triggering from the trauma — is all very real,” said Nira Singh, a licensed clinical psychologist. “Recognizing when somebody needs help ... is so important.”
But equally important for community members is to limit their exposure to “repeated scenes of the violence,” especially on television, said Singh, who is the director of behavioral health at Asian Americans for Community Involvement.
Community members at the town hall said that the brutality of the Jan. 23 Half Moon Bay shooting is a wound that’s still fresh. It’s also one that is sparking conversations around better working conditions for farmworkers and laborers, The Chronicle reported.
In late January, elected officials called for stricter gun laws and accessibility of mental health services for Chinese-speaking farmworkers, a segment of the population often overlooked.
Assembly Budget Chair Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, on Friday announced the allocation of $6.5 million from the state budget toward securing a permanent space for Richmond Area Multi-Services Inc., a San Francisco nonprofit that manages an outpatient clinic and wellness center, particularly for AAPI seniors.
“The violence and trauma experienced by our AAPI communities over the last few years are more than any community should ever have to go through,” Ting said in a statement. “State investment is needed in order for our community to move forward, and because RAMS has a strong record of communitybased, culturally sensitive care in my district, I trust they can meet the moment.”
Speakers at the town hall called for similar measures, but included the importance of other initiatives, such as working with city councils to put forward ordinances around the control of guns.
An inter-ethnic community dialogue around bystander training, facilitated by the Islamic Network Group, is also tentatively scheduled for the summer by Sunnyvale community leaders.
The suspected Half Moon Bay shooter, 66-year-old Chunli Zhao, was reportedly a disgruntled farmworker at one of the two shooting sites. After his arrest, he admitted to the shootings in a jailhouse interview, saying he’d been bullied and had endured long work hours.
The farmworkers are reported to have been living in “deplorable” housing environments, including shipping containers, where they make only $9 an hour, state officials, among them Gov. Gavin Newsom, said at a news conference one day after the shooting.
Zhao is accused of fatally shooting seven Latino and Chinese farmworkers at two sites, California Terra Farms and Concord Farms in Half Moon Bay. He reportedly told law enforcement officials he suffered from mental illness and wasn’t in his right mind on the day of the killings.
The horrific shooting came just days after the community was still recovering from another incident in Monterey Park, where authorities say Huu Can Tran, 72, fatally shot 11 people at a dance studio during a Lunar New Year celebration and later killed himself.
The unyielding stream of tragic events has contributed to an information overload of traumatic news that can be harmful to people’s mental health and resilience, clinical experts say.
Psychological experts say that consuming more than 20 minutes of traumatic news a day is harmful to one’s mental health, and is especially true when watching videos, The Chronicle reported.