Storytime: Why I advocate for mental healthcare

(TW)

It all started in 2012.

I want to continue advocating for mental healthcare & removing the stigma behind it in Japan.

When I was a university student, I did a lot of community outreach on-campus for students in crisis.

Growing up in a first-generation Pakistani-American household/community, we were always told that depression, PTSD, and getting help for experiencing domestic violence was only for white people.

We were taught that if anyone even saw a therapist, they'd risk getting deported.

In my community, domestic violence was common (usually the husband would do it to the wife & kids). In Muslim households, we would be taught that the women would have to submit to men, and that it was just a part of our culture. If we felt any sadness, we'd pray it away.

Our parents carried a lot of intergenerational trauma with them to the US. They were the generation that grew up after Pakistan became a country in 1947.

The partition was violent. People were raped and slaughtered. My grandparents refused to talk about it.

It's epigenetic.

My parents were slightly different from the typical immigrant parent in our community. My father, especially.

His father was a diplomat, but my father lost everything. He came to the states to study business, but dropped out of community college because he couldn't handle it.

My mother went to a fundamentalist all-girl's Islamic school. She was very repressed. Actually, my dad was a closet athiest.

So I grew up with parents who criticized the systems around them.

They immigrated to the US so that they could be free to be themselves.

And so, I would notice certain things around the systems I was in; the black kids at my school got harsher punishments. The Imam said that women should submit to domestic violence. My teachers told me that my community was full of txxrorists. How most of the teachers were white.

When I was in middle school, the "emo" subculture got popular. I'd listen to Linkin Park and MCR a lot, and ended up hanging out with other kids who did the same.

Some of my friends self-harmed in secret.

We had counselors but they didn't want their parents to find out.

To Write Love On Her Arms was a popular non-profit that advocated for mental healthcare. Popular celebrities like Amy Lee from Evanescence would promote it.

But at that time, it was a Christian organization. The image of mental healthcare advocacy didn't match my friends.

Fast-forward to my freshman year of university.

During my freshman year, an Indian-American upperclassmen ended his own life on-campus. It made national headlines because it was coincidentally the same day the president visited our school.

He was in the same social circles.

It broke my heart. That someone with a similar identity as me couldn't get help. Our university didn't offer free counseling at all. Not even a trial. You had to pay $50 per session, at least. And there was a three-month waiting list.

I wanted to change the system.

In 2012, I met an Indian (Trinidadian)-American girl. She started up a chapter of TWLOHA on-campus. She told me that they were secular, and that students could be trained in QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer) for suicide crisis intervention. I joined the committee and we advocated.

There was another org on campus that also did grassroots advocacy for mental healthcare. A few more suicides happened on-campus and off-campus. Most of them were Asian-Americans in the engineering program.

After lots of work, my uni started to offer 6 free counseling sessions.

They also offered counseling rates at a sliding scale. The lowest amount was $5 per session.

It was a major accomplishment.

Although majority of the students on-campus were rich white kids from Jersey, many minority students joined our student org. We'd have workshops.

During my senior year, someone I knew ended her own life on-campus.

We had the same classes when I was in engineering. She was a first-gen minority student.

It kept happening all around us. Students would get overrun with stress from school and the pressure to be perfect.

In December 2013, I found out that our uni's Muslim Student Association was doing a panel on mental health in the community.

I left Islam a few months before, but I knew it was detrimental for my community to be aware about mental health.

So I was a panelist that night.

Over 300+ people across the DC metro area came to my university's campus to hear us speak.

There was a woman who talked about having an eating disorder, a woman who talked about being HIV positive and converting to Islam, and me.

I talked about stigma and advocacy.

There was also a Pakistani-American counselor from our school who was a part of the panel, along with a white counselor who specialized in eating disorders.

I spoke about how people policed eachother on how devout they were, how there was a lack of data, and accessibility.

I told everyone that therapy is quite liberating & beneficial, even if you're not in crisis. That it's okay to ask for help and admit that you're not okay. Sharing your true feelings is the ultimate strength, not weakness.

I saw people writing notes + listening to me intensely.

I was also asked some questions at the Q&A. I answered in a way that could help those who were either secular or religious. At first I was nervous, but then I felt comfortable on-stage. I was always shy and never did public speaking before.

But on that night, I talked forever.

After the event, many parents came to me. A hijabi woman held my hands and cried. She said she saw cuts on her daughter's body and didn't know...but thanks to my presentation, she said she'd take her to a therapist. Other students thanked me for representing our community.

I continued to do advocacy work: workshops, training, group healing sessions, crisis intervention, demonstrations, etc. until I graduated.

It meant so much to me when people from my community would just look at what I was doing.

I know how hard it is to come up to someone.

After I graduated, I moved to Japan and worked through the JET Program. At the highschool I worked at, some of my students had clear signs of distress. One of the kids on my school's dance team had self-harm scars. My Japanese friends were also battling depression.

When I asked about counseling, I was told that there was someone who came to the school once every few weeks.

My students didn't want their parents to find out, get embarrassed, or get in trouble, so they almost never went to the counselor.

Counseling is also expensive (about $150-$250 USD per session) and they were low-income. Many people here don't believe in mental healthcare.

Many people also don't take psychology classes. They don't know about how depression involves a lot of biological phenomena in your brain, and how it could debilitate your ability to function as a mental illness.

I didn't even learn about things like executive functioning or how the human brain responds to trauma until I decided to advocate for mental healthcare. I can only imagine how little information is known by the average student here.

Every August, the faculty would be on high alert. I learned that in Japan, more people under the age of 18 end their own lives on September 1st than on any other date.

More info here. https://qz.com/1067558/in-japan-more-teenagers-commit-suicide-on-sept-1-than-any-other-day-of-the-year-because-of-anxiety-of-going-back-to-school/

I was only an ALT, so I also had little control over the kinds of intervention teachers would do. Some were very sensitive to the students' needs.

Others would condone power harassment against us younger teachers and treat the kids so terribly that they'd drop out of highschool.

A lot of the kids who would drop out would be low-income and were members of the Brazilian community. It was a cycle and I felt so powerless...

So I started writing.

Ever since I did that presentation for my uni, my slogan was always,

"Advocacy is the best medicine."

So although I could only do so much for my kids, I wanted others to know about the amount of adversity they were battling, outside and inside the classroom.

When we spread awareness, we promote change.

When Hana Kimura passed away, I was reliving how I felt in the past...how I saw the scars on my friends and students.

Also, how we can't see the scars in everyone's minds. How it's easy to pretend that we're alright. How it may seem like a burden to show your mental scars.

We have a high suicide rate in Japan.

We also have many people who are undiagnosed with all kinds of mental illnesses, suffering in silence.

I want to help everyone heal.

I want them to know that I care about their scars.

Showing that can really help them heal.

So when I say that the media should talk about mental healthcare, I mean every bit of it.

It shouldn't be dismissed or ignored when we're discussing someone's suicide.