Parent's Anxiety Can Be Overwhelming for Kids

There is an old adage that states “life is a marathon, not a sprint.”  Many Korean and Korean American teens growing up here in the states are faced with hyper pressure to do well in life and school.  They often erroneously perceive that their future is completely ruined if you failed to achieve near perfect GPA or SAT scores.  One of the most common calls I receive from a High School counselor near my office is “one of my Korean students wrote a suicide letter because s/he received an A- on her/his final grade in math.”  For those of you whoever felt this way, I want to amplify this old adage once again, and say that “life is a marathon, not a sprint.”  It is an adage because no matter how clichéd it may sound, it does contain some truth to it.  Many of most influential people in our society have very humble beginnings.  Even intellectual giant like Albert Einstein was rejected by his first choice of university, Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich.  Instead, he attended the Argovian cantonal school, a gymnasium in Aarau, Switzerland to complete his secondary schooling.  J.K. Rowling was a school teacher until 23 and published her first book in her mid-30s. Vincent Van Gogh did not paint until age 27.  Steve Jobs was kicked out of his own company at his early 30s and had to start all over again.  You get the drift. 

For the parents of these teens, please help them to gain some perspective in life.  Perhaps you are more anxious than your teenage children about their future.  If this is true for you, take a breath and examine your own life.  Take an inventory of your achievements and failures.  Would you not agree that your own success has do with your willingness to take risks and fail at times?  Our children are so deathly afraid to fail that they have developed an aversion to take on any risks that may lead to any kind of failure.    Denise Pope, PhD. from Stanford University echoes this sentiment in her book “Doing School: How we are creating a generation of stressed out, materialistic, and miseducated students” where she says that out of our own anxiety about staying on top of our educational achievement, we are creating a generation of Stanford educated students who do not know how to be creative and become leaders of our community.  Rather, we are raising a generation of children who are good at jumping through the hoops to get better grades. 

My point is simply let’s give some room to our teenagers to explore, and even dare to fail at their first attempts to figure out what it is that they think they want to contribute to the world and hopefully leave it better than the way they found it.  In order for the grownups to witness this process, we better understand that “life is a marathon, not a sprint.”  

Culture-Bound Syndromes

In addition to Western psychiatric disorders, Asian Americans also may experience culture-bound syndromes, such as shinjing shauariuo and hwa-byung.  These syndroms may draw upon Asian persons' mind-body connection.  In many Asian cultures, the mental ill are so stigmatized that sufferers may experience their anxieties as physical aches and pains

SHENJING SHUAIRUO, or neurasthenia, is a medical disorder triggered by stress.  The symptoms include sensation of pain or numbness, chronic fatigue, weakness, anxiety, and fainting.  Neurasthenia is an acceptable medical diagnosis because it conveys distress without the stigma associated with a psychiatric diagnosis.  

HWA-BYUNG, or "fire-illness," is a Korean folk illness.  Sufferers report such symptoms as a heavy feeling in the chest, sleeplessness, hot flushes, cold flushes, and blurred vision.  It is thought that hwa-byung might serve to provide sufferers with a way to conceptualize and resolve emotional distress. 

Getting Help

Such barriers as language, culture and little access to care keep many Asian Americans from receiving help for mental illness.  Asian Americans as a group are unlikely to seek help for mental illness from any source, and when they do they report low levels of satisfaction, according to as-yet-unpublished research by Takeuchi and Jennifer Abe-Kim, PhD, an associate psychology professors at Loyola Marymount University.

So how can the mental health community reach out to this group?

"Education," says Abe-Kim. "A lot of immigrants aren't aware of resources."

From my own experience, working with medical providers is particularly important because they are usually the first or only professionals seen by most immigrant and U.S. born Asian Americans with mental illness.  Furthermore, I would say mental health service providers need to go where the people are at such as schools, churches or community centers.  For example, Cut It Out, a national program originally created by antidomestic violence groups in Alabama, is working to prevent domestic violence by reaching out to women in nail salons.

Takeuchi and Abe-Kim say many cultural and mental health issue still need to be examined.  But, as for many minorities, the essential issue remains, in Takeuchi's words, "How do you fit into society?  How do people from different racial and ethnic groups find a "place" or a sense of belonging in thier neighborhodds, schools, or workplace?"