Anti-Asian rhetoric and incidents have been on the rise in recent years, spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
These types of events reinforce trauma and fear within the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community and have profound effects on mental and physical health, says Gilbert Gee, PhD, professor in the Department. of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
“People’s reports of discrimination and unfair treatment have been linked to major depressive disorders, clinical anxiety disorders and mood disorders,” Dr. Gee says. “It takes a pretty large toll on people’s mental health.”
The AAPI community is made up of more than 22.6 million individuals with more than 40 distinct ethnicities, along with distinct differences in language, religion, education, socioeconomic status and immigration patterns.
Rates of various mental health diagnoses also differ between generations regardless of ethnicity. For example, second-generation Asian Americans have higher rates of psychopathology (symptoms that may indicate mental disorders) than Asian Americans who immigrated to the U.S., according to a 2014 study in the Asian American Journal of Psychology.
Though more research on use of mental health services among these groups is needed, disaggregating data can provide a fuller picture as to what disparities remain.
“Aggregation is a big problem because Asian Americans represent so many diverse groups,” Dr. Gee says. “You have people from Pakistan who are assumed to be equivalent to people from Korea or from Thailand or the Philippines, and all these subgroups are very different.”
Overall, Asian Americans are 50% less likely than other racial groups to seek mental health services, says Dr. Ito. In some Asian cultures, mental health challenges are viewed as an individual problem or weakness and talking openly about sadness, disappointment or depression is rarely encouraged.
Dr. Jeffrey Hsu, a cardiologist at UCLA and co-author with Dr. Gee on an article describing the plight of the AAPI community during the COVID-19 pandemic, says culturally competent care, or equipping providers with education and training to understand a person’s values, experiences and personal beliefs, is essential to improving health outcomes.
Read more at UCLAHealth.org.
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