When San Francisco commissioned a study in 1971 about the mental health of local children, it found that only one Chinese American kid in the city was receiving mental health treatment.
“There weren’t linguistically and culturally appropriate services,” retired mental health social worker Nancy Lim-Yee explained.
And as a result, she said, the vast majority of Chinese American children simply weren’t seeking the help they needed. A year after that 1971 study, the Chinatown Child Development Center (CCDC) was established under federal funding and later became a program of the city’s Department of Public Health. Now, some 50 years after its founding, the organization is still fighting some of the same stigma that prevents Asian American families from getting their children psychiatric and psychological services.
Lim-Yee, 70—who worked at CCDC as the director until her retirement in 2014—told The Standard that because of the negative connotations in Chinese language to describe mental health, some Chinese American families hesitate to sign up for therapy and opt to hide the issues. For Chinese immigrant kids, experts say the need for mental health services should be more urgent, given the additional pressures they might face in the United States.
For 50 years, the Chinatown center has been trying to eliminate that stigma against therapy—especially among immigrant parents of struggling kids.
Read more at SFStandard.com.
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