For many Asian students, depression is not an option. Raised in a culture where the stigma surrounding mental illness is so severe, I grew up with an internalized fear of anything that strayed from my clear-cut vision of normalcy. In the city, when I walked down the crowded streets with my mom, there would be beggars on every corner, many claiming some sort of mental or physical disorder. I remember my mother scoffing one time, leaning towards me in a cloud of clean lavender scent, and saying indignantly, ‘That man says he cannot work because he is depressed yet does he not have two hands and two feet? He should find work instead of sitting here all day.’ For some reason, that stuck with me all throughout middle and high school, my mother’s scathing words.
In eighth grade I began feeling long bouts of anxiousness. I dismissed it as teenage angst. Freshmen year came and went - the sadness too, almost like in waves. I would make up for the emptiness I felt by being extra happy when I was around my friends, only to find that at the end of the day, I was even more emotionally drained than before. I could not tell my parents what was wrong, for fear that they would perceive me as lazy or insolent. It wasn’t until junior year that I began questioning the firm aversion of the d-word my family had tried so hard to enforce.
On January 27th 2015, Luchang Wang, a Yale University mathematics major, committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. She is remembered by friends as equally brilliant as she was compassionate. Yet regardless of how much she offered to the world, she could not find reason to stay. I remember reading this story online while doing some college research and being struck by the image that accompanied the article. She had a demure and happy face, balanced nicely with a half smile; she seemed perfectly normal. But underneath, I kept wondering, what darkness resided to push her to such limits as death? And the more I looked and researched, finding more and more accounts of Asian student suicides across college campuses, a scary thought descended on me. I could imagine why they would throw their lives away and even more frightening, at that particular moment, I could envision myself doing the same.
Asian American women aged 15 to 24 have the highest rates of depressive symptoms of any ethnic or gender group, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. A study by C.M. Cress and E.K. Ikeda in 2005 has shown that Asian American college students are more likely to consider suicide than their peers, both white and other people of color. Other studies exhibit the unwillingness of Asians in identifying themselves with mental illness, documenting that Asian Americans are less than half as likely than our non-Asian counterparts to report mental illness to their friends and/or to seek treatment.
As the so-called “model minority” of American society, Asian students face increasing pressure to uphold the perfect success story and therefore are self-discouraged from seeking help. In our families, mental illness is a sign of dishonor so we hope to never define ourselves as the like and must pretend that we are okay.
We are okay we are okay we are okay we are okay----
----depressed.
