Jennie Brooks, host of the Unstoppable Together podcast, talks with Dr. Jenny Wang, a Taiwanese American clinical psychologist, author, and national speaker on Asian American mental health. Tune in as they tackle stigmas to addressing mental health, creating more equitable access to support, and the rise of xenophobia in advance of her new book, Permission to Come Home, released on Tuesday, May 3, 2022.
Jenny Brooks:
Welcome to Booz Allen Hamilton's Unstoppable together podcast, a series of stories that unite us and empower each of us to change the world. I'm Jenny Brooks with Booz Allen Hamilton. I'm passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Please join me in conversation with the diverse group of thought leaders to explore what makes them and all of us unstoppable.
We had such a deep conversation with Dr. Jenny Wang that we're going to publish this episode in two parts. Both were recorded at the same time, so be sure to listen to part two once you've finished part one. Enjoy.
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Unstoppable Together podcast. I'm your host, Jenny Brooks. I'm thrilled today to talk with Dr. Jenny Wayne. Dr. Jenny is a Taiwanese American clinical psychologist, speaker, and mental health activist, who is passionate about destigmatizing mental health for Asian Americans. She's also the author of the new book Permission to Come Home, which will be released on May 3rd and tackles the stigma that Asian Americans face in caring for their mental health. Dr. Jenny, welcome to the Unstoppable Together podcast.
Dr. Jenny Wang:
Thank you so much for having me and for offering space to share about the work and really trying to destigmatize mental health in many different communities.
Jenny Brooks:
Thank you very much for taking the time to be with us. Your book is essentially a first of its kind. What inspired you to write it? What do you hope readers will take away from it?
Dr. Jenny Wang:
When I think about the original grounding purpose of this book, honestly, it was for my two young kids. I have a nine year old and I have a five year old. One day they will be young Asian American adults who are having to tackle a lot of the issues that I currently face. One of the things I really hope that they would take away from this book one day is that they understand that their emotions are not a threat to them. That in fact, leaning into their emotions and trying to understand the information that's located there is actually part of the transformative knowledge and work. So much of Asian culture, I think we've been taught that emotions are threatening, and scary, and difficult to manage, and so lets push it to the side. Let's suppress it. What gets lost is a wealth of information about how we show up in the world, what we feel we're capable of being engaged in, and how we interact with other people. My hope is that this book will help people start to question some of the frameworks that they might have had, maybe learned through their families, their culture, society at large, and start to break them down and transform those frameworks into something that they can claim ownership over.
Jenny Brooks:
Wow, that's so powerful for children, in particular, as they're developing to arm them with some of those strategies. I'm also struck by the fact that you started the Asians for Mental Health Instagram community in September, 2019. That was five months before the start of the COVID 19 pandemic. How did you evolve this platform to ultimately address the mental health challenges that arose throughout the pandemic for the Asian American community?
Dr. Jenny Wang:
Now, honestly, this platform started out of a frustration. I was scrolling on Instagram one night and was thinking about how there was such a plethora of information that was generally about mental health, but there was nothing that was geared towards mental health from the lens of being Asian, of having Asian identity, of being a child of immigrants. The platform initially began with just wanting to prompt people to think about how our racial or ethnic identity forms the basis for mental health. It's how I see the world. It's how I think about myself in the greater context of the world that I live in.
It started as a, "Let's see how this goes, because I'm not very social media savvy," but I thought, I wanted to talk about things from the lens of somebody who, for most of our lives, we might have felt invisible. We might have felt as though there was no space for us in the larger conversations in society. It started off as a questioning and an invitation for people to start to think about how their identity mapped onto mental health, but then as the pandemic essentially erupted in the United States, as we watched the murder of George Floyd, as many different social issues started to evolve, it started to become, at least for me, a community in a safe Haven, for folks who were looking for a sense of grounding, a sense of community and connection during some of the hardest times of some of our lives, honestly. As it evolved, my hope was that people were constantly being invited thinking about their mental health as something that permeated their every single daily lives, or their daily lives in every single moment.
In many ways, I wanted to dispel this myth that mental health was a condition in which you were hospitalized for. That's called mental health, or schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. That's what's called mental health. Within the Asian community, the stigma of mental health is so strong that we don't really seek it out unless we are in crisis, when things are so bad that our lives are being torn apart. That's the danger of ignoring our mental health. That was my goal, was really to help people say, "You know that loneliness that you feel throughout pandemic? You know the difficulties of communicating with your partner? You know those feelings of vicarious trauma that you're experiencing while you're witnessing all these videos of people being attacked in your own community? All of that is mental health."
Jenny Brooks:
Wow. Do you find on the Instagram community, so you are going on to three years with it now, do you find that it spans all ages?
Dr. Jenny Wang:
I would say that, especially on social media, there is almost a cutoff point where parents probably aren't ready for their 11 year olds to be on Instagram, or 13 year olds. I would say that the primary age range of people who tend to engage on my platform probably fall within the college age and then upwards of their mid thirties, forties, sometimes older than that. They're young adults who, one, have access to technology. Two, have an interest in mental health and come from maybe predominantly Asian American communities, but then there are individuals who also are kind of living in silos in different parts of the country, where there are not primarily Asian American enclaves. I would say that, in terms of age, something that has come up again and again in this platform and community is truly how alone many of us feel.
I would say that spans all ages, whether you're in college and surrounded by people, but yet you're in the midst of pandemic, and college looks really different than you might have imagined, or you're in your thirties and forties, and you are working. You might be a parent. Life is very full and it's hard to invest time in self care in connecting with others, especially in the midst of pandemic. I would say that one theme that runs cross sectionally across all these generations and ages is just simply how I isolated people feel. That's one of the things that I love about this platform is that people will share their intimate experiences sometimes on the post comments, and others will say, "Oh my goodness. I thought I was the only one. I thought I was the only one that struggled with this."
I think that, in itself, helps people realize it's not me. It's not my fault that I feel this way, and releases from some of the shame, some of the embarrassment or stigma that might surround some of these mental health struggles. I think another theme in the last several years, particularly in the Asian American community, is what does it mean to be Asian American in terms of our identity, in terms of who we are in the greater context of the United States? I think with pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian violence, and hate, it really begs the question, who am I? What does society expect me to be? Who do they view me to be? What do I need to release from in order to claim my identity?
I think, for many of us, as Asian Americans, especially if we're in that second, third generation, our parents taught us that assimilation was the ticket to acceptance and belonging, but we're quickly realizing, especially within the COVID pandemic, that assimilation is not enough to protect us. There are people being randomly attacked in subways. They're being attacked on the way to work. These are not situations in which our simulation is enough to keep us safe. The question is, and I think we're all wondering, what do we need to do now to transform what protection looks like on an individual level, and a community level?
Jenny Brooks:
Yes.
Dr. Jenny Wang:
What do we need to explain in order to move towards that self-protection?
Jenny Brooks:
That's exactly the question that was coming to my mind as I was listening to you, which is with the rise of hate towards this community. That awareness of what you just set around the culture of assimilation not offering the protection really struck me. I was wondering, as an ally, how do I, one, increase awareness of culture of assimilation, and then how can I engage? What would you offer?
Dr. Jenny Wang:
I would say that for allies, one of most important things that you have access to is your level of influence in the people who are in your life. In the sense that, as an ally, let's say you have certain privileges being perhaps white, perhaps being male, perhaps being cisgender, there are certain privileges and power that you hold by having those identities. People might be more willing to listen to you, to hear you out when you might share about the anti-Asian violence or hate. The first thing I would say is, we're not asking that you make massive grand gestures about being an ally or how to support our community. We actually ask that you go to your homes, go to your workplaces, your family, those intimate spaces of influence to say, "Hey, did you know that this was happening?"
The most heartbreaking aspect of all of this is that we, as Asian Americans, we might be able to watch and view all of this anti-Asian hate, but a large proportion of people in the United States still have no idea that this is ongoing. As an ally, one, just calling attention to these situations, to the discrimination, to the violence, helps move the dial, even just a little bit. In terms of offering some protection, some awareness, even some bystander intervention training that individuals could pursue would help immensely. I think a second piece is that, as an ally, if you have a relationship with someone who is from the Asian community, then even the acknowledgement that these acts, this violence may have some sort of impact on them, may be so powerful.
I think for a lot of the Asian community, we've been taught that we don't discuss these painful parts of our lives. We don't bring them to that conscious conversation level or attention. As an ally, if you are my friend, if we have a safe relationship, then you checking in with me allows me to feel that I'm not alone in this, that there are people outside of our community who can offer empathy, compassion, and even just support through some of these real really difficult times. As an ally, I'm thinking about two pieces. One is using your voice to raise awareness, and then two, using your relationships with marginalized people to offer support, to name some of these experiences and bring them to conscious level attention.
I think of when you're at the workplace, and sometimes microaggressions occur. Sometimes, as a person of color, I may doubt whether or not it was a microaggression, because it's sometimes so subtle. When a colleague says to me, "Hey, Jenny, I noticed person said that to you. That felt wrong. That felt biased. That felt like a microaggression, but I'm curious, how did you receive that?" That gives me a safe space to say, "Huh, you noticed it too, right? Maybe I'm not making it up. Maybe I'm not too sensitive. Maybe that was a real experience for me." Those are some thoughts that come to mind when I think about allyship.
Jenny Brooks:
Thank you. This wraps up part one of our conversation with Dr. Jenny Wang. Be sure to tune into part two where she tackles mental health access, allyship, and her hopeful outlook. Enjoy.
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