Asian American Mental Health

If you are an Asian American who has experienced racial violence, verbal harassment, stereotyping, or microaggressions, you might feel like the world is unsafe. You may suffer from anxiety, depression, or painful memories as a result of this trauma. And if you seek help, you may find that Western-trained mental health professionals simply can't understand your pain and life experiences. This book provides culturally informed treatment methods to help you heal from and fortify yourself against race-based trauma-including intergenerational and historical trauma-and stress.

In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation.