Psychological consequences resulting from acculturation on Asian American Women

Throughout the course of the semester, we had discussions on the problems Asian American Immigrants face when they immigrate to the United States from Asia, but never really about how these problems affect them psychologically or emotionally. This is something I have found rather interesting as we work on our group projects. My group decided to bring up the issue of Asians and Asian American Women and eating disorders. This somehow led to me reading about mental diseases Asian American Immigrants experience from acculturation issues after a discussion with a psychology professor.

On a larger level, it is easy to identify that one problem these immigrants may face are language barriers which we talked about with regard to the videos and readings on Cambodian/ Vietnamese Immigrants trying to retain their welfare. We also had quite a few readings with regard to the desire that many immigrants have to remain within their communities to preserve cultures from their homelands.

What we did not really talk about are mental disorders among Asian American Women. A collaborative research report on the Age of First Onset Major Depression in Chinese Americans mentioned that one of their most consistent findings in depression research is that women are more likely to become depressed, and this happens to do with acculturation issues. This is because as immigrants acculturate, culturally protective factors may be lost which leads to increased risk for depression.

In some discussion somewhere, we must have talked about how Asian/ Asian American parents try to keep their children in rather sheltered environments and seem to be over protective. But after reading this paper, it seemed to be that the reason for the actions of the older generation could be associated to the relationship between acculturation and depression which may be salient for those who migrate when they were older. This could have resulted from the stress of relocation, the loss of one’s support network and the need to adapt to a new environment. To deal with this, the older generations capitalize on family support and hence find it hard to give up their traditional ideals. It seems to be that this would have been an interesting topic to look further into as, at least for me, it really brought together some of the things we talked about in class and I guess made me sympathize with the fact that not only did these Asian American women that we have been talking about all semester have to deal with the stresses of moving to a new country, they were likely to suffer from depression and other psychological problems.