intergenerational trauma hmong community

#INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA HMONG COMMUNITY HOW TO#

The new generation antipsychotics put people at risk for high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes. REICHERTER: Antipsychotic medication is super dangerous. And if these clients were on the wrong medication, it could have scary consequences.

That's just not how mental illness works. Ninety percent of a population cannot be psychotic. That's 90%.įOO: So Daryn immediately thought that cannot be right. And we kind of got a spreadsheet and realized that almost all of them, maybe 160 of them, were on antipsychotics. REICHERTER: At the time, I think we had close to 200 Cambodian patients here. But shortly after starting this job, Daryn noticed something strange. And about 20 years ago, Daryn was a young psychiatry resident moonlighting at Gardner Health Services, a community clinic that was providing mental health care to the local Cambodian community. He's a white dude who kind of looks like Dr. Oh, I love this room.Īnd that's how I heard about this community clinic in my hometown that was trying to solve the same problem and in the process found themselves in the middle of a ghost story.ĭARYN REICHERTER: When something comes at you that you don't know what it is, don't make any assumptions.įOO: This is Dr. So I set out to see if there was a way to heal our parents and in doing so, even heal ourselves. This stigma prevented most of my friends' parents from getting help, too. And they never sought help for those wounds because they told me that therapy was for crazy people, and they weren't crazy. I believe that my parents abused me and eventually abandoned me because they were hurting so deeply from their own wounds. But that was never an option for my parents' generation. For years, I went to therapy, and that helped me. When I found this out, I wanted to figure out if there was a way to fix this, to make it stop. But recently, when I went back to my old high school and I talked to the new counselor there, she said it's still happening, that she has so many students that are being physically abused at home, she can't even count them. And we're still affected by it every day.Ī lot of things have changed since I was in high school 15 years ago, and I was hopeful that this abuse had lessened in that time. It was shared, with a lot of my friends' traumas, mirroring my own. At home, we were neglected, beaten and yelled at so much that it was normalized in my community. Lots of us had loving, supportive parents, but it happened to a lot of us, most of my close friends. You'd catch glimpses of it when report cards came out, when we got caught wearing skimpy dresses at homecoming, when someone's secret boyfriend got found out - because that's when we could expect the abuse at home. If you know, you know.īut in this paradise, something darker was happening. Though we also played a lot of DDR at Golfland, and every party featured King Eggroll. The local hangout spot was literally called the Great Mall.

There was a huge Vietnamese population, lots of Filipino, Mexican, Korean and Chinese kids like me. It got that name because it's beautiful - 75 and sunny most of the time, streets lined with cherry and citrus trees, air that smells of eucalyptus - maybe why so many of our parents flocked there. STEPHANIE FOO: I grew up in a place called the Valley of Heart's Delight, specifically San Jose, Calif. A quick heads up - Stephanie will be talking about genocide, war, domestic violence, suicidal ideation and child abuse.

#INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA HMONG COMMUNITY HOW TO#

And while researching her book and how to heal herself, she found a story about what it looks like to heal a community. She's a journalist who wrote a book called 'What My Bones Know: A Memoir Of Healing From Complex Trauma.' She writes about having complex PTSD, the science behind the diagnosis and the various therapies and treatments used to heal from it. SHAW: But it's one thing to acknowledge that trauma is real and another to figure out, OK, so what do we do about it? That's something Stephanie Foo has thought a lot about. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: It's kind of like an invisible elephant in the room. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: I'm in the aftermath. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: This is not something that a person chooses. UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Intergenerational trauma. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Generational trauma. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Communal trauma, racial, cultural trauma. And it's a problem we hear a lot about these days. So when I first heard about today's story, I was like, wow, so many communities are facing this problem.

Intergenerational trauma hmong community