5 Barriers that Asian Australians face with starting therapy
Let’s talk numbers. A good proportion of the clients that I work with in 1:1 therapy are of Asian heritage background. If I had to guess, I’d say its about 40-50% of my caseload.
I feel very lucky to have this group of clients place their trust in me as their therapist because I know that the statistics for Asian who access counselling aren’t pretty. According to Mental Health America, Asian people are the least likely to engage with mental health services compared to all other racial groups in Western countries including Australia.
Amongst the university cohort, only 6.9% of Asian international students had ever accessed mental health services compared to 45% of their peers (Yoon and Jepsen, 2008).
With so few Asian Australians accessing therapy, it’s important to try to understand what personal barriers that this group might be facing. Here are my thoughts on 5 such possibilities:
1. Mistaking emotional distress as a physical ailment:
It’s not uncommon for people of Asians to report ongoing uncomfortable physical sensations such as an upset stomach, headaches, muscle tension, and to assume that there must be a physical cause’ rather than an emotional or psychological one. What we know is that the mind and body is very much connected, but culturally it can be harder for Asians to draw this link.
2. Lack of emotional awareness and self attunement:
It can also be harder for Asian people to possess high emotional awareness and self attunement skills without actively working to develop these through activities like journaling or therapy. This can be at least in part, due to a lack of introspection being modelled by our parents. Introspection is a person’s ability to turn their attention inward and notice their thoughts and emotional state. Chances are, if you’re Asian, you might not really notice that you’re headed towards burnout or an emotional outburst (ugly-crying, snapping at others, socially withdrawing out of exhaustion) until it’s too late. Some are simply not aware of what they’re not aware of…
3. Thinking they don’t need it because they’ve not reached crisis mode yet. Pushing on has worked so far:
Sometimes I wonder if hustle-culture started this us Asians. It probably didn’t, but it’s easy to see how common the attitude of ‘pushing on’, ‘working hard’, ‘being efficient’ is amongst this group. Children of immigrant parents are more likely to adopt a scarcity-mindset when it comes to money and work opportunities, as this probably formed a very real part of our parents’ lives as they grew up. It simply was too risky to pause for self-care unless you absolutely needed to. Unfortunately this means it can be harder for an Asian Australians person to manage their mental health from a preventative approach. We wait until its bad enough to ‘really need’ therapy as we don’t want to risk wasting our time resting when we don’t really need it.
Some may opt to avoid the feeling of guilt and anxiety that comes with being less productive in order to care for themselves. And this might actually work for a while, thereby further reinforcing the avoidance of help-seeking.
4. Discomfort with vulnerability and emotional talk:
The sound of crickets. That’s what I usually hear when I ask my Asian clients to tell me about a time they talked about their feelings with their parents. We simply don’t lean towards saying the ‘mooshy’ stuff. Words of affirmation aren’t really a thing. There probably wasn’t really a space to say “I love you, you mean a lot to me” or “I’m feeling upset and quite sensitive at the moment…”. Instead affection and warmth was likely demonstrated via acts of service or quality time. (Think having a bowl of cut up fruits or mum offering your favourite food in lieu of an apology).
5. Seeing it as a selfish to involve an outsider with family and personal matters:
Reputation is a big thing in Asian culture. In a collectivist society, each individual’s’ actions reflects the community to which they belong to. A child’s behaviour is seen to represent how ‘well’ their parents raised them. Given this, it makes sense they some Asian people would be deterred from going to therapy is they felt there was a risk that ‘complaining’ about their parents would evoke strong feelings of shame either from the towards themselves or from their community/family.
If you’re an Asian Australian hesitating with starting therapy, perhaps connecting with an Asian therapist is the first step you could consider. You might find it easier to connect and build trust with a Psychologist who can bring a cultural lens and lived experience and combine this with their ‘textbook training’.
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