When we were younger, mental health meant keeping yourself safe and happy, anti-bullying campaigns, and census data studies. That’s not to say these approaches weren’t helpful, but we’ve certainly come a long way since then. Nowadays, mental health is a more comprehensive subject, working to normalize therapy, expand protections, advocate for the mentally ill, and educate individuals on crucial topics like substance abuse, while creating and honoring periods of awareness like National Suicide Prevention Month. As a child born in the U.S. to parents from France and Malaysia, my community’s approach to mental health has followed a similar uphill battle toward a better environment for all. 

In the heart of the Malaysian nation, addiction was taboo, and there was little talk of mental health, the general opinion being that it was an expat’s subject, part of the Western world. As the product of a fusionary Asian hot pot mix, I’ve often witnessed the disregarding of emotional well-being in favor of grades, reputation, and familial tradition. As for my maternal heritage, the French prefer to keep quiet about their troubles, and the restrictive nature of the cultural male standard — the standard being an emotional void —  and the woman’s role of the silent, long-suffering glue of the family, leads to the repression of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and other mental illnesses, which end up exploding outward like a milk saucepan on high heat. This is why Christmas with my family in the frosty lavender fields of Provence is often disastrous. 

For both of these cultural backgrounds, and the myriad of others in the world, the common denominator is the driving desire for the new generation to improve on the shortcomings of the former. Drives home from school were almost always about grades when I was younger. The first things my grandparents wanted to know when they saw us were about scholarly performance and extracurriculars, the size of our schools, and the grandeur of American academics, all the ways their grandchildren were making good of opportunities that had been three generations in the making. 

To every kid my age reading this, I’m sure there’s a kernel of your own story in that. Our parents and their ancestors have sacrificed for us to be where we are now, and they would rather not hear about the shadows that are swarming our heads, nor our dark thoughts or lack of appetite, and certainly not the days we’ve spent like sleepwalkers without hope. 

But to every kid my age reading this, our families, our communities, our cultures, they can change. Transformation is possible. We’ve seen it in the last two decades, and I’ve seen it in my own family. It takes emotional honesty and the strength of a community, or sometimes it takes a mental health catastrophe in the family to crack the decades of repression and trauma open, but either way, it’s possible. Just think about this: my family car rides have gone from grades to “how was your day?”.