Starting Emotional Wellness Dialogues with South Asian Youth
Please join Hume Center's Preet K. Sabharwal & Nina Kaur at the Asian American Psychological Association's Convention on August 8, 2018 in San Francisco.
Click here to review information about this Presentation on the convention website.
Hume Center is proud of our staff and alumni as they use their experiences to educate the professional community. The South Asian community is a thriving population here in the United States. Despite their growing numbers, this community is unlikely to seek and utilize behavioral health services. The underutilization is due to a variety of reasons, many of them associated with stigmas about behavioral health. Stigmas of behavioral health are enforced further by the lack of knowledge about what behavioral health is, what therapy is, what confidentiality entails, and what the role of the therapist is. Most importantly, the lack of words in the South Asian languages to describe emotional wellness concepts and the lack of language based services and resources is ultimately the biggest barriers to utilization of services. Mental health outreach programs have started to make some progress in educating this community through the utilization of translators, language brokers and clinicians that speak the South Asian languages. As clinicians working with this population our experiences have shaped how we approach this community and how we bring about awareness of emotional wellness. We have realized that the population is more willing to reach out for support when it comes to their children instead of their own struggles. With this buy-in, we have decided to create a mental health outreach model on how to engage South Asian youth. This engagement allows South Asian youth to expand their emotional vocabulary, explore their identities, identify positive and healthy coping strategies, improve communication, expand support systems, and establish healthier relationships with family and peers. We hope that through this process, we are able to help families also engage in conversations around emotional wellness and in return, decreasing stigmas of reaching out for support for South Asian adults as well. In this presentation, the clinicians will utilize their experiences to provide examples and vignettes to explore different challenges in working with South Asian youth. One of the clinicians will highlight some of work she is conducting in which she is facilitating emotional wellness camps this summer for South Asian youth. Interactive Process The presenters will ask the audience to participate by having them discuss their experiences of working with South Asian youth and how they have engaged them in talking about topics of emotional wellness. The presenters will also utilize the vignettes to increase the participant's understanding of emotional wellness, role of culture, and how to implement interventions. The presenters will be creating an email, that will be shared with the audience in order to facilitate and provide the opportunity for the members in the audience to email the presenters with questions following the presentation or sometime in future.
Click on this link to learn more about our South Asian Community Health Promotion Services