Asian Americans commit half of suicides at Cornell

Cornell Minds Matter, a new student group focusing on mental health issues on campus, organized a lecture by Wai Kwong Wong, Ph.D. of Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), to address mental health concerns in the Cornell Asian community yesterday. The lecture, entitled "Breaking the Silence," focused on encouraging members of the Asian community to seek help and talk about mental health concerns.

Laura Alves '07, a member of the Cornell Minds Matter executive board, decided to organize the event, because "the stats [on Asian American mental health issues] we got were daunting, and I thought, we should have a forum to make Asian students aware that these problems exist."

According to Wong, Asian students at Cornell commit 50 percent of completed student suicides, even though they make up only 17 percent of the entire Cornell population. Asian students are also most likely to report problems with stress, sleep, sexually or physically abusive relationships and hopelessness. Asian students are least likely to utilize CAPS, and when they do, they are often very reluctant, referred by a faculty member and visit only a few times.

Wong said, "So what's wrong with these guys? Isn't everyone at Cornell stressed?" He discussed stereotypes, such as: Asians are all good at math and science, they can fix your computer, and they're very self-reliant.

He even offered up an anecdote: he walked into his high school English class one day, looking glum, and his English teacher, the now-famous Frank McCourt -- author of Angela's Ashes -- asked, "What's wrong?" Wong replied, "I think I just failed my math test," and McCourt responded, "You can't fail math, you're Chinese!"

While he had the audience chuckling, Wong reminded listeners that these stereotypes comprise a part of the stigma that discourages Asian students from seeking help. There have been cases in which Asians have received differential treatment, for example, a T.A. grading an Asian's problem set harsher than a non-Asian peer's.

He said that they also often experience resentment. For example, a non-Asian might walk into a class full of 30 Asian students on the first day and think, "there goes the curve." The stigma that Asians are self-reliant, "problem-free" geniuses creates a huge barrier. Not only do they feel the need to identify and live up to the stereotypes, but others expect them to as well.

Wong outlined two major developmental concerns that often contribute to Asian mental health issues. The first is identity; how you see yourself versus what other people -- family, friends, professors -- expect you to be.

The second concern, he said, is purpose. Many Asians associate success with academic and economic achievement, which is fueled by family expectations.

"Definitely we have a lot of family issues, me being Chinese American," Darleen Chien '05 said. These family pressures can be generational and cultural conflicts, which cause stress because individual wishes are subordinate to family wishes.

Alves said that, "Everyone knows [the family issue] exists, but we don't talk about it. It's so common in the Asian community; everyone experiences it."

There is an emphasis in Asian culture to avoid problems, the "don't think about it" approach. Wong highlighted an example from his own life about a lack of communication in his family. While composing a family history in graduate school, Wong discovered that he had a brother who committed suicide. He never knew about it because he was very young at the time and neither his parents nor his older sister ever talked about it. All the pictures of his brother were removed from the family photo albums.

Wong refers to the stigma of shame as a "corrosive emotion, you feel bad for feeling bad ... it's a vicious cycle."

Rahul Banerji '07, president of Cornell Minds Matter, delved further into the idea of shame, admitting that he took a leave of absence for bipolar disorder and said, "I was so ashamed and couldn't even face my family. I didn't come back for three years. These are issues we should be talking about, breaking the silence."

Wong concluded that people need to recognize this "conceptual invisibility," meaning that, even though Asians are highly visible on campus, they're also ignored.

Banerji was "glad [Wong] spoke about what changes we can implement to foster discussion about this, revealing effective ways that will change the situation."

According to Wong, it's all about overcoming the "conspiracy of silence," and remembering that seeking help is a sign of strength.

No Laughing Matter

By Wai-Kwong Wong
©2005 The Cornell Daily Sun
March 29, 2005

Recently, The Sun inadvertently offered a fine illustration of the problem of "conceptual invisibility" discussed in my own March 10 Mind Matters lecture, "Breaking the Silence: Destigmatizing Mental Health in the Asian and Asian American community." In the very issue that our community's paper of record published a thoughtful article covering the event, it also ran Stephen Davis's "The Adventures of Antman" comic in which "over-achieving, curve-busting" Asian and Asian American students are objectified and vilified, along with Ithaca's infamous weather, the hilly campus and sky-rocketing tuition, as "terrible things" at Cornell.

Laura Harder, author of the piece on the lecture, even makes note of the resentment and problems caused by stereotypes of Asian and Asian American students as self-reliant, problem-free math and science geniuses -- the "CyberAsians" of "Antman."

Although one might be tempted to attribute this juxtaposition of the feature article and the cartoon to racism or to dismiss it as merely lack of editorial vigilance, we would rather look on it as part of a larger, more pervasive problem that has been at the center of our work as Cornell's Asian and Asian American Campus Climate Taskforce (3ATF) -- a problem that makes Davis's cartoon (and the Sun's decision to publish it) no laughing matter.

The most dramatic -- and most dire -- element of 3ATF's findings was that students of Asian descent committed a disproportionate number of completed suicides at Cornell. But this is only the most striking aspect of a broader trend that shows Asian and Asian American students being most likely to report significant problems in a number of important areas on health surveys, such as stress, abusive relationships and feelings of hopelessness, while at the same time least likely to seek advice from faculty or staff, least likely to use counseling services on campus and least likely to feel that their ideas are taken seriously by their peers. We found this unique and troubling profile to be directly related to, among other factors, the "conceptual invisibility" of Asian and Asian Americans on campus -- an invisibility fueled by the "model minority" myth so clumsily rendered in Davis's cartoon.

While comprising the single largest community of color on campus (and in that sense, "literally" visible), Asian and Asian American students are rendered "conceptually invisible" when they are seen primarily through the distorting lens of this myth -- that is, when they are seen merely as well-oiled, smooth-running academic machines, devoid of emotions or needs and, consequently, not at risk in the way that their "human" counterparts are.

Unwittingly -- and we use this word advisedly -- Davis's cartoon exemplifies the corrosive racist stereotypes that perpetuate such misleading assumptions. The Sun's decision to run the comic strip, even as it covered my lecture on the damaging social and psychological effects of such representations, compounds the problem while epitomizing the conceptual invisibility of students of Asian descent. What concerns us most is that, within such an atmosphere, mental health needs are more easily ignored, bias incidents more easily forgotten, and complaints more easily dismissed.

The most alarming aspect then of the Sun's recent editorial choices is the way in which those choices enabled precisely this easy dismissal of Asian and Asian American student needs and complaints. Although perhaps not consciously undercutting Harder's fine article, the editorial staff, by choosing to run Davis's cartoon, effectively marginalized the very important concerns articulated in her piece.

Even more disturbing has been the response elicited by the one (thus far) published letter to the editor complaining about the Sun's decisions. Unpublished, emailed responses to a severely critical letter by Gregory Ngai Hom '05 have generally rejected Hom's criticisms as "an overreaction," "over sensitive" and lacking a sense of humor. To be sure, Hom's impassioned letter did not disguise his outrage. But we should distinguish the manner in which the outrage was expressed from the validity of, and the grounds for, the outrage itself. Just as the appearance of Davis' cartoon redirected attention from, and undermined, the substance the lecture covered in the front page article, reaction to Hom's letter seems determined to shift the focus from the problems facing Asian and Asian American students to the reaction of the person articulating the problem.

The issue here is not an angry student's mode of rhetoric but, instead, Davis's portrayal of Asian and Asian American students as unfeeling, curve-busting automatons who are somehow alien to the University. This sort of evasion can never lead to positive change.

Perhaps a simple place to begin to work toward positive change is for the Sun and the broader Cornell community to realize that students of Asian descent are fellow Cornellians who suffer through the same miserable weather, the same topographical inclines and the same financial burdens as everyone else.