Responses to Mental Health Issues Among Chinese American Christian Communities: Report from Focus Group Conversations
Jennifer Tu, MD, University of California, Los Angeles
Though medicine seeks to heal even the most complex mental illnesses, it is often limited by social norms. Social norms commonly inform how community members treat individuals struggling with mental illness, as well as how those individuals perceive themselves, resulting in mental health shame and stigma. In religious communities, theological frameworks directly contribute to the norms that shape how mental health is addressed. Theologically grounded understandings of healthcare, particularly mental healthcare, thus ought to involve changing norms through community interventions. Working toward a community intervention for mental health, this study focuses on mental health-related beliefs and attitudes of a specific ethnocultural population: Chinese American Christians.
Community interventions for mental health often take the form of multi-sector collaborative care models, but as physicians such as Castillo et al. have pointed out, few have included non-healthcare partners (2019). Of these non-healthcare partners, churches have served as a significant site of community engagement, particularly among minoritized populations. Community interventions for mental health are based on three suppositions: (1) an acknowledgement of multiple facilitators and barriers of mental health at all levels of society, ranging from individual to community and policy; (2) an emphasis on the community’s active role in developing and delivering interventions, incorporating skillsets external to the healthcare system; and (3) the prioritization of social and community mental health outcomes (Anderson et al., 2015).
In this focus group-based study, self-identified Chinese American Christians (N = 39) were asked to name helpful or harmful ways that Christian beliefs/practices and Chinese American identity affect responses to mental health problems, as well as actionable ways for Chinese American Christian communities to better support people struggling with mental health issues. Participants were able to identify specific facilitators and barriers to mental health, as well as to recommend the cultivation of safe spaces dedicated to open dialogue, integration of Christian belief and psychological perspectives, and general mental health awareness and education. These findings demonstrate the potential for an effective community intervention that addresses perceived sources of mental health shame/stigma in this specific population. They also invite further exploration of how, by changing social norms, partnerships between medical experts and religious communities can push the limits of both medicine and theology.
Community interventions for mental health often take the form of multi-sector collaborative care models, but as physicians such as Castillo et al. have pointed out, few have included non-healthcare partners (2019). Of these non-healthcare partners, churches have served as a significant site of community engagement, particularly among minoritized populations. Community interventions for mental health are based on three suppositions: (1) an acknowledgement of multiple facilitators and barriers of mental health at all levels of society, ranging from individual to community and policy; (2) an emphasis on the community’s active role in developing and delivering interventions, incorporating skillsets external to the healthcare system; and (3) the prioritization of social and community mental health outcomes (Anderson et al., 2015).
In this focus group-based study, self-identified Chinese American Christians (N = 39) were asked to name helpful or harmful ways that Christian beliefs/practices and Chinese American identity affect responses to mental health problems, as well as actionable ways for Chinese American Christian communities to better support people struggling with mental health issues. Participants were able to identify specific facilitators and barriers to mental health, as well as to recommend the cultivation of safe spaces dedicated to open dialogue, integration of Christian belief and psychological perspectives, and general mental health awareness and education. These findings demonstrate the potential for an effective community intervention that addresses perceived sources of mental health shame/stigma in this specific population. They also invite further exploration of how, by changing social norms, partnerships between medical experts and religious communities can push the limits of both medicine and theology.