What is the minority stress model & how does it affect Asian Americans?
Contents
What is the minority stress model?
How does minority stress impact Asian Americans?
What is Assimilation Theory?
The minority mental health care gap
What is the minority stress model?
Culturally responsive care as a solution
What is the minority stress model?
As a member of a minority community, you may have noticed that you face stressors that are uniquely challenging. You might have found it hard to access quality mental health care or find a provider who understands the struggles you’re going through.
It’s not just you – there’s a name for that.
The minority stress model outlines how minority groups experience stress arising from stigma and discrimination. This includes being treated differently in day-to-day moments or having your health concerns dismissed by medical professionals.
You may also experience personal struggles due to living as a minority in a majority culture. As a racial minority, it can be difficult to navigate the bicultural tension between, say, your home life and your school life, as you are constantly bearing the cognitive load of shifting between contexts. If you’re a member of the LGBTQ community, for example, you may be juggling contexts where you feel fully accepted and others where you feel the need to conceal your identity.
Many studies indicate this minority stress can predispose you for negative physical and mental health outcomes. As such, the minority stress model is a tool that can help us better understand the lived experiences of minorities by acknowledging the increased incidents of stress we experience within the social structure of culture or society due to prejudice and discrimination. Let’s dig further into these experiences!
How does minority stress impact Asian Americans?
It’s no secret that Asian Americans experience microaggressions, racism and discrimination as a minority group in the US, with examples ranging from university admissions to being called offensive names or being treated differently. We have also seen a 339% rise in anti-Asian violence over the past 2 years, resulting in Asian Americans reporting the greatest increase in the prevalence of depression and anxiety among all racial groups.
This experience is exacerbated by the pressures of assimilation.
What is assimilation theory?
Assimilation theory proposes that immigrants adapt to the pressure to conform by following a “straight line’ convergence, increasingly expressing the norms, values, and behaviors of the with each generation.
Where earlier generations of immigrants may display acculturation – the adoption of new beliefs and behaviors without rejecting their own native culture – later generations are likely to carry this to further extremes, becoming more likely to display assimilation. The key difference is that assimilation is a form of cultural change that involves abandoning one’s own culture in the name of being accepted in the new society.
What’s the difference between acculturation and assimilation?
Berry’s model of acculturation suggests that assimilation is actually one of four distinct sub-categories of acculturation:
Assimilation involves adopting your “receiving culture” and discarding your “heritage culture”
Separation involves rejecting the “receiving culture” while retaining your “heritage culture”
Integration involves adopting the “receiving culture” and retaining the “heritage culture”
Marginalization rejects both the “heritage culture” and “receiving culture”
Even if some of these acculturation experiences seem less harsh than others, each and every one involves an intricate negotiation of expectations and identity.
Integration, for example, may seem desirable, but it leads to a high degree of bicultural tension – the perception of stress due to navigating more than one cultural or linguistic context on a daily basis. Hasn’t ‘who you are’ at home ever felt different than ‘who you are’ with your friends? Or at work? And what about when those worlds converge – how do you juggle the different parts of your identity demanding to be performed at once?
To some, assimilation may seem aspirational, but it often creates a great disconnect between the assimilated individual and family members that still belong to their “heritage culture”. Returning to relatives in other countries can be an awkward or stressful experience when you barely speak the language, feel constantly judged for your Americanized behavior, or just don’t share much in common with the people there.
More often than not, the process of acculturation leaves members of the Asian American community without a sense of belonging and feeling like a perpetual foreigner in both their “received” and “heritage” culture.
Simply put, being a member of a diaspora is an inherently complex situation.
What is the model minority myth?
The expectations of straight line assimilation theory can also be internalized by families, creating immense pressure for each immigrant generation to perform better than previous ones. This is a contributing factor in the perfectionism that has been observed in the Asian American community, which is widely agreed to have implications for mental health.
This is augmented by the Asian American experience of the model minority myth. This stereotypical narrative claims that Asian Americans are highly intelligent and universally successful. It suggests that, of all the minorities in the USA, Asians are the “model” group due to their impressive performance in competitive fields. Aside from being incredibly generalizing and erasing the individuality within a huge population of people, this creates a cultural pressure to set the standard for a “worthy” minority who has “earned” their place in the majority society.
As a result, many Asian Americans choose risk-averse careers that emphasize status and stability, such as medicine, law, or engineering. Due to their exceptional performance in the workplace, they’re often excluded from conversations around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), despite still facing discrimination and prejudice. Instead, the struggle of the Asian American community is minimized compared to others, making it difficult to ask for help as it contradicts the perfectionist expectations imposed on them by society.
The minority mental health care gap
It’s clear to see how all these factors create an experience that is unique to Asian Americans as a minority group, one that requires a tailored mental health care solution. There is a lot of research upholding the idea that the traditional healthcare system leads to less effective outcomes for minorities.
For example, 34% of Asian Americans are the U.S.-born children of immigrant parents, with 68% of the adult population being immigrants themselves. Some psychologists have noted that this has an overlooked impact on mental wellbeing as children of immigrants often have significant supporting roles in their family.
Other studies reinforce this notion, emphasizing that the psychological field has often failed to take into account the cyclical trauma of immigrant communities. Minorities are also known to incur higher rates of misdiagnosis, potentially due to the lack of research about psychology treatment and services for ethnic minority populations.
This is further supported by studies which have found that families with migration-related trauma face substantial barriers to receiving mental healthcare. Sometimes – but not always – these are related to affordability.
All these factors lead to a mental health care system that overlooks the complexity of the minority experience, and leads to ineffective treatment, misdiagnosis and higher long-term rates of chronic depression and suicidality.
Culturally responsive care as a solution
But all hope is not lost.
At Anise Health, we have adapted traditional methods of mental health care to offer a culturally responsive alternative, built with an acknowledgement of the minority stress model. Our evidence-based approach considers the role of cultural context and offers specialized support to the Asian American community to meet your needs through modalities that resonate with them.
Our providers have undergone comprehensive training to understand your cultural stressors and how to provide care that feels right to you. For example, often the Asian American community struggles with vulnerability and seeks practical, actionable solutions over discussing their feelings. Our therapists use methods that make you feel more comfortable opening up to them, while our coaches help you find action-orientated insights to keep you engaged.
Plus, you’ll have access to our digital platform with hand-selected psychoeducation resources, content, alternative forms of medicine and support groups on some of the minority stressors we discussed today (and more)!
Sign up for Anise today to receive personalized care.
