April 4-6, 2024 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Innovations in Health Communication
Innovations in Health Communication
Abstract: South Asian Youth’s Communicated Sense-Making of Mental Health: The Role of Self, Family, and Sociohistorical Events
Taking a culture centered approach (CCA) and drawing on the communicated sense-making (CMS) theoretical model, we explore how adolescents and young adults of South Asian descent experience and talk about intergenerational understandings of mental health (MH) in focus groups (n=10) involving 62 youth (ages 13-22). While several sense-making devices have been proposed in CMS, they emphasize individual-level processes to make sense of one’s experiences within the family structure. Participants in our study recognized that individual processing of family orientations to MH were crucial to their experiences and understandings of MH, but they equally recognized the impact of institutional processes and societal stereotypes that exist both within and outside of one’s communities. Accordingly, we integrate CCA and CMS to highlight the importance of individual processes in shaping one’s understandings of MH in families and communities along with the sociohistorical factors and societal biases that were recognized by participants.
In our data, attributions (assessments of the cause of or degree or responsibility associated with an action of behavior) and communicated perspective-taking (CPT, the process through which individuals acknowledge, attend to, confirm, and create space for the views and perspectives of others) were frequent devices drawn on by youth as they engaged with familial and broader cultural understandings of mental health. These devices were often nested in complex ways to explain the intricacies of youth’s MH experiences. For instance, youth readily reflected on their parents’ upbringings and immigration experiences as both attributing to the causes of their parents’ and their own MH challenges within their families while simultaneously demonstrating deep sympathy for and understanding of their parents’ struggles. They described respect for parents’ hard work, sacrifice, and intentions associated with parents’ difficult journeys coming to the U.S. and upbringings outside of the U.S. where mental health was not prioritized. They connected their parents’ experiences to their own learned understandings of MH as they watched their parents “suffer in silence.” Similarly, youth simultaneously described a transference of prior generations’ trauma from war and immigration, while also attributing cause to themselves, describing individual accountability for addressing and coming to terms with their own MH struggles. While they recognized that their parents did not prioritize MH largely because of how they were raised, they described internalizing guilt and shame when not living up to familial and community expectations and saw themselves as responsible for their feelings of inadequacy and for addressing unhealthy mental states. The intertwining of CPT and attributions became more nuanced across age groups, with young adults especially describing a broader sociohistorical context to make sense of South Asian values that they acknowledged are sometimes “hard to put into practice given the context of the world we currently live in.” Such values included “don’t make trouble” and “don’t question or fight.” Participants did not reject these values entirely but worked to fit them into the seemingly contradictory values of minoritized youth in the U.S., for example, fighting back when faced with social injustices and racism that directly impact MH and well-being.
In our data, attributions (assessments of the cause of or degree or responsibility associated with an action of behavior) and communicated perspective-taking (CPT, the process through which individuals acknowledge, attend to, confirm, and create space for the views and perspectives of others) were frequent devices drawn on by youth as they engaged with familial and broader cultural understandings of mental health. These devices were often nested in complex ways to explain the intricacies of youth’s MH experiences. For instance, youth readily reflected on their parents’ upbringings and immigration experiences as both attributing to the causes of their parents’ and their own MH challenges within their families while simultaneously demonstrating deep sympathy for and understanding of their parents’ struggles. They described respect for parents’ hard work, sacrifice, and intentions associated with parents’ difficult journeys coming to the U.S. and upbringings outside of the U.S. where mental health was not prioritized. They connected their parents’ experiences to their own learned understandings of MH as they watched their parents “suffer in silence.” Similarly, youth simultaneously described a transference of prior generations’ trauma from war and immigration, while also attributing cause to themselves, describing individual accountability for addressing and coming to terms with their own MH struggles. While they recognized that their parents did not prioritize MH largely because of how they were raised, they described internalizing guilt and shame when not living up to familial and community expectations and saw themselves as responsible for their feelings of inadequacy and for addressing unhealthy mental states. The intertwining of CPT and attributions became more nuanced across age groups, with young adults especially describing a broader sociohistorical context to make sense of South Asian values that they acknowledged are sometimes “hard to put into practice given the context of the world we currently live in.” Such values included “don’t make trouble” and “don’t question or fight.” Participants did not reject these values entirely but worked to fit them into the seemingly contradictory values of minoritized youth in the U.S., for example, fighting back when faced with social injustices and racism that directly impact MH and well-being.