As it does every year, San Francisco senior service agency Self-Help for the Elderly is welcoming its mostly Asian American clients with good news, special pastries and traditional red envelopes with wishes for good health, peace and prosperity. is marking.
But this year’s mood has been marred by Saturday’s massacre in Monterey Park, a predominantly Asian American community near Los Angeles, where 11 older people – between the ages of 57 and 76 – were fatally shot at a dance ballroom. was killed. Annie Chung, the organization’s CEO, said she is concerned about the mental and emotional effects of the shooting on her seniors.
“Like everyone else, they cling to any kind of news on genocide, and that in itself is not healthy,” she said. “I worry that if they don’t take themselves away it’s all going to sink in, and they’ll be very sad and very scared.”
In light of the tragedy and the many years of collective trauma endured by the Asian American community, Chung and other advocates said they are concerned that recent mass shootings and assaults are creating mental health trauma for many Asian Americans. And they fear that many needy people either won’t get help or won’t be able to access proper care.
Many Asian Americans are struggling with a mental health crisis
Saturday’s stampede happened as Monterey Park was celebrating its first Lunar New Year celebration before the pandemic. Then on Monday, a second mass shooting killed seven people in Half Moon Bay, California, adding to the trauma. The victims have been identified as Latino and Asian American farm workers.
On Twitter, US Representative Grace Meng, D-New York, wondered whether a better mental healthcare system could prevent violence.
“We don’t know the motives yet, but I wonder how things could have been different if there had been a stronger mental health and social services network.” Meng wrote, “Yes, it’s about gun safety laws, yes it’s about stopping Asian hate, but it’s also about a generation of #AAPI veterans who live a life of unheard trauma.”
Charissa Cheah, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said research shows that acts of violence both personally experienced or experienced through the media or otherwise can harm mental well-being. The rise of both in recent years for Asian Americans has harmed the collective mental health of the community, he said.
Stop AAPI Hate, a San Francisco-based organization formed to combat anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic and collect data, has since begun such tracking on Asian- There have been over 11,000 reports of anti-American and Pacific Islander hate incidents. Data in March 2020.
Viral videos showing six Asian women killed in Atlanta spa attacks in March 2021 and four Sikhs as well as Asian seniors killed along with four other victims in a mass shooting at an Indianapolis FedEx facility in April 2021 in violence affecting the community A series is included. There is unnecessary fighting on the streets of the city.
Asian Americans less likely to seek mental health care
Compared to Americans of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, Asian Americans are less likely to receive mental health treatment and three times less often than their white counterparts, according to a 2015 report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Is.
Reasons include language issues, lack of culturally relevant and integrated care, cultural stigma associated with seeking mental health help, cost, and other systemic barriers. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, more than half of Asian Americans and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders 65 and older have limited English proficiency, and community members fear what neighbors might think or bring shame. are less likely to care. to their parents.
“Increased mental health, high financial costs and a lack of mental health professionals with language and cultural expertise are just a few of the many barriers to accessing mental health care,” Chieh said. “These barriers were present before the pandemic but the need for such services and the workload for mental health providers have grown exponentially.”
Language barriers may prevent Asian Americans from accessing medical services
Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, an advocacy agency based in Los Angeles, said the stigma toward mental health care echoes among Asian Americans more widely felt than in the general population.
“More than stigma, there are issues of access,” Kulkarni said. “Most health care plans have minimal coverage for mental health services, and sometimes they outsource them to other entities. Those who speak limited English, how to navigate that, and a lack of culturally literate providers Is?”
Kulkarni, who also teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, said students had told her that campus counseling services include few Asian American physicians.
“They are all older white women, and while they may have a strong understanding of cognitive behavioral therapy, they have a very limited understanding of the issues the students bring to them,” Kulkarni said. “If you have thousands of completely white providers who only speak English, that’s the bottleneck I’m worried about.”
Some Asian Americans fear they are being targeted
In Self-Help for the Elderly, Chung said some of her clients had expressed apprehension about what they saw as a gun-happy society and the societal pressures affecting those in their community. The organization has 10 senior centers in the California Bay Area.
“In general, our elders are afraid that someone might attack them unnecessarily,” she said. “They think they haven’t harmed anyone – so why are they being beaten up, stabbed and murdered?”
Over time, she said, such fear and self-isolation can lead to depression and loss of appetite.
“It’s a real concern,” she said. “The fortunate ones have senior centers or clubs, but those who may be disabled or very frail, or who have no support from family, are isolated. If they do not make contact and are not connected to an existing program , so it is difficult for us to know who and where they are.”
mass shootings create a sense of trauma
Anne Saw, an associate professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago, said that when news of the Monterey Park shooting first broke, many in the community were concerned that it was another act of anti-Asian racism.
“It speaks to its pervasiveness, when the first thought is, ‘This must be,'” she said.
The gunman, identified as 72-year-old Huế Canh Tran, was found in a white van on Sunday, dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
There was little comfort when it was discovered that the perpetrator was a Vietnamese American.
“A mass shooting is a traumatic event, whether it is racially motivated or not,” Saw said.
Asian American gunmen target members of the community
In a way, the fact that the suspect was Asian American was more troubling, said Kulkarni, whose agency put together a list of mental health and other resources available to the community in the aftermath of the Monterey Park shooting. While the crime was not anti-Asian in the traditional sense, it still targeted members of the community; The criminal knew it was the Lunar New Year and knew there would be hundreds of people outside.
At first, “the threats felt like they were coming from outside,” she said. “Now they think they are coming from inside.”
The shooter in the Half Moon Bay attacks was also Asian American. Chunli Zhao, 67, was taken into custody as a suspect in that crime.
‘No safe space’ for Asian Americans
Richelle Concepcion, former president of the Asian American Psychological Association, said there is a growing belief in some Asian American communities that “there is really no safe space for our communities,” she said. associated with immense sorrow. ,
Stop AAPI Hate released a statement in the wake of the shootings, saying that these incidents have amplified the pain, fear and trauma felt by the Asian American community over the past several years.
“We have long dealt with many forms of hatred and violence coming from outside, within and between our communities,” the statement said. “The identification of the shooters in both of these recent massacres does not, and should not, diminish or diminish our pain and fear. We do not know the motivations behind these shootings, and we may never know. But the uncontrolled use of guns Access changed both.” These acts of violence amount to genocide.”
Fighting back can improve mental health
One silver lining, said Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, is that the growing anti-Asian climate over the past several years has inspired more people to stand up for the problem, especially for seniors. From local efforts like chaperone services to a broader push for social change. He added that such actions can also help address mental health struggles.
“The community is very keen to find collective strength. And collective strength is what enables it to bounce back and soldier on,” he said.