By Lisa Deaderick | [email protected] | The San Diego Union-Tribune
Tri Luu says he remembers the difference his own ADHD diagnosis made with his mental health and his academic, and future professional, success. He wants to help young people in the Vietnamese and larger Asian community avoid the struggles that come with not having access to resources earlier in life.
Luu is Vietnamese American and a licensed attorney and managing partner at Skaja, Daniels & Luu law firm. His diagnosis came later in life, during law school, and he says the difference he noticed in his own performance was stark. Before his diagnosis, he wasn't a great student; after being diagnosed and taking medication, he jumped to the top 15% of his class and says law school even seemed easy. When he told his parents about learning that he had ADHD, they told him he had been diagnosed as a child, but his mother didn't want to put him on medication.
"So, there's a stigma around mental health -- that it's not real, it's not a thing. You're just hyper, just calm down. My story is important because I don't want any other kids to go through that route that I took and wait until 20-something years later to fine out and turn your life around," he says. "I'd rather have them get the treatment early."
Part of that work to support young people in his community has come in the form of a grant from the San Diego Foundation, which recently awarded $500,000 to local nonprofits to expand mental health services for youth 15 to 24 years old, focusing on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities. One of those nonprofits is the Vietnamese American Youth Alliance (VAYA), which has received $65,000 toward this work to support the organization's community health committee and its programming for youth and families. According to the 2018 to 2022 demographic profiles report from the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency and Live Well San Diego, more than 400,000 people in the county are part of this demographic, with more than 11% identifying as Vietnamese. In the San Diego Foundation's "State of San Diego Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians & Pacific Islanders Report," suicide was found to be the leading cause of death for AANHPI youth and young adults in California in 2022, noting the barriers to culturally competent mental health care in the county.
Luu, who is also on the board of directors and chair of the partnership relations committee for VAYA, took some time to talk about their work to destigmatize the topic of mental health and their plans for increasing this support for young people and families in their community. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/author/lisa-deaderick/.)
Q: This grant from the San Diego Foundation is in support of VAYA's mental health program for youth and families. First, tell us about the community health committee. What is it and what does it do?
A: We formed this in response to me jumping in and really becoming engaged in this mental health work. When I heard about this grant, I thought this was my chance to make a big difference. In this group, there's an opportunity for me to focus on the Vietnamese community, and the Asian community at large, to make sure that we have adequate access to mental health services and to spread awareness about it. For a lot of MediCal patients, for instance, trying to get mental health services for anything is next to impossible.
The committee now is 15 strong and we just got an outpouring of support. We're partnering with an organization called the International Vietnamese Mental Health Association, and they're a group of mental health professionals who are providing all of the professional curriculum and presentations. The age group is 15 to 24, but it's really to engage them and to kind of get at this intergenerational divide and all of this stigma because for the refugees, which came from Vietnam, there's a lot of intergenerational trauma that's passed down from the older generation to the youth. The older generation, if you try to ask them about the stories, a lot of them just don't want to talk about it and they carry it with them. They carry it with them until they pass, and then the story never gets out, they never share the story. They take all that burden because that's also in our culture, that you're supposed to take on and shoulder all of the difficult times and just make a better path for your children. When they do that, they do it as a sacrifice. It's supposed to be your job, but you also lose all the stories that they carry with them. So, I want to make sure that that's not lost.
Q: What is the committee's mental health program for youth and families? What does this program entail?
A: It's a series of eight workshops, and the workshops are presented by our mental health professionals, that talk about different types of mental health issues. One example of the workshop is talking about bullying and the effects of bullying, and we provide preventative care to the youth and talk to the youth and tell them it's OK to get treatment. That it's private, it's confidential, it's something they don't have to discuss with other people if they don't want to. We're also looking at bridging that language barrier and the workshops are going to be focused around also making sure that the Vietnamese, or Asian, populations know that you can have mental health therapists that speak your language, can communicate with you in the language that you're more fluent in because not speaking the language is a huge reason why a lot of these populations don't go to therapists. Mental health and psychiatrist discussions, all of that is verbal, it's about communication and if you can't communicate because of a language barrier, that's a huge problem. So, we're exploring a partnership with a new AI company that has translation services where you speak in Vietnamese and then it spits out a translation in English. We're trying to bridge that divide so that families feel more comfortable with treatment. We also partner with certain organizations, such as Pacific Health Group, that are social services that help provide access to hard-to-reach mental health services, and they come in as a social service net that allows the family resources to access these mental health services that we provide.
With workshop development, we're trying to be creative. One of the workshops that we have is going to be at the Hidden City Film Festival. The Bridge Lab Foundation is another organization that also got this grant and they engage their youth to provide mediums through which they can present their mental health outlets, how they get help and make sure that their mental health is stable. Some of the students create documentaries that talk about their issues and talk about mental health, and then they use that medium and as an outlet for mental health. So, we are going to be at the Hidden City Film Festival in Escondido. We going to potentially provide a documentary series that talks about refugees from Vietnam, and how that impacted the refugees that came over here, and use that to lead into a discussion about mental health. We're trying to creatively engage with our audience with these workshops to talk about and provide resources for mental health.
Q: In what ways, specifically, are you planning to use the grant money for mental health services for your young people?
A: We're using the grant money to support local organizations. We'll rent out these locations, we'll provide sponsorships to some of these organizations that support local communities, and we're providing scholarships. We're providing an opportunity for students from 15 to 24, access to two scholarships for $4,000 each, to host a mental health workshop. They would apply, present an idea for what they want to talk about in their mental health workshop, and it'll be supervised and led in conjunction with a mental health professional. Under the supervision of that professional, they would be the one to present their own mental health workshop and they will get a scholarship for doing so. More importantly, they will be presented with that scholarship and receive accolades at the San Diego Tet Festival. This scholarship is for any students in high school and college who are interested in mental health. It'll help jump start their career and they'll get a nice, sizable scholarship out of it and a lot of accolades and recognition.
Q: Can you talk a bit about what you've seen in VAYA in terms of the current state of mental health among your members and local Vietnamese youth in general? What are you seeing and hearing from young people themselves, and also their families, about things they may be struggling with?
A: The biggest thing is getting the older generation to engage in the discussion at all. That is huge. And, the loss of culture and the intergenerational divide between the youth and their families. I've had more than a few students that have come to me and said, "Hey, I want to get in touch with my Vietnamese roots," and they see the festival and VAYA as one of the few ways to do it because their families aren't involved in anything and their families don't provide it. Or, if they do, it's not in a way that's engaging to the youth. The youth that we have, they come to the festival because it's fun, it's something that is interesting to them. When you talk about mental health or Vietnamese culture, you have to know how to engage the youth, otherwise they'll just turn away and they'll get bored and they'll look the other direction. I've heard that from the youth and I've also had that from the families. That's why we've gotten creative about how we engage the youth.
Q: What are you hearing from them about the kind of support they're looking for?
A: Support to engage and discuss things with the older generation because trying to get the older generation to listen to them is really difficult unless you're a figure of authority. Being an authority figure, myself, as an attorney, I've had more than one or two youth who come to me and say, "Hey, look, can you have a conversation with my parents?" because the youth who try to have the conversation, some of the parents just say, "Oh, you don't know what you're talking about. Stop arguing." I think one of the phrases that is very prevalent in Vietnamese culture is, "Don't argue with your parents. They're always right." You hear it and you don't believe it at first, but it is very much a thing. That makes it so difficult because if somebody's saying, "Don't argue with me, I'm just automatically right," there's no discussion to be had. It takes someone who is in a position of authority or respect to kind of bridge that gap and engage that discussion for them so that the parents listen in the first place.
One of the things that we really pride ourselves on is activating and allowing youth to create their own paths and giving them enough guidance to follow the path they want, but at the same time not restricting them in what they want to do. Our Miss Vietnam San Diego pageant is a great example of that. As a condition of the scholarship and the title, we require them to come up with their own nonprofit initiative. This year, (they) came up with their own nonprofit initiative centered around autism. They're working with Autism Tree to have their own workshops talking about neurodivergence and some of these issues that, again, carry a huge stigma in the Vietnamese community where the levels of neurodivergence, and low level autism and Tourette's, even though it's not as bad, it still exists. It's almost pushed off to the side. So, we want to be able to engage the youth, but at the same time, give them a little bit of freedom, so we don't restrict them. We say, "You do what you want to do, just make sure that you actually commit to it and here's the groundwork so that you can do it." I think the Miss Vietnam girls this year have been outstanding in their nonprofit initiatives.