Asian-American Student Suicide

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According to Hijioka and Wong of the American Psychological Association, suicide remains a leading cause of death in the Asian-American community. The highest suicide rate is among those Asian-Americans between the ages of 20 and 24. For college students, Asian-American students are also more likely than their White American students to have experienced suicidal ideation. A combination of reasons play a role in influencing someone to commit suicide; social, psychological, and biological factors all influence a person in some way. But these risk factors differ for different culture and ethnic groups, as well as cultural views on the topic of suicide and prevention. In Asian culture, the pressure of living up to family expectations and the stress …show more content…

Asian-American students are especially familiar with this feeling; the feeling of fear, anxiety, and stress when they come home from school and are asked about their grades. Growing up in a Vietnamese household, I have learned that anything less than a B is considered failure; an A grade is always the goal, and B is just average. However, striving to meet such goal can come at a cost for many students, who in addition to balancing schoolwork, are also in the process of discovering their identity and place in the world. Kevin Lam brought up the cases of three Asian American colleges students who committed suicide at three elite universities where one of the students left a note to explain her action. The note simply expressed that the student felt she did not live up to expectations. The …show more content…

The struggle with acculturation can be a source of family discords, which can isolate children from their parents, and leading young adults to feel depressed. Hylton said, “The risk of suicide among Asian Americans with family problems was triple the risk of other Asian Americans, even factoring for depression.” As Asian-American youths learned to acculturate to Western culture, they may no longer share the same Asian values as their parents. At the same time, parents are afraid to let their children adopt too much of the American culture because they fear their children may lose Asian roots. In one of their examples, Kramer et al. said, “…parents may encourage their children to learn English in order to succeed in American society but may refuse to allow them to speak English at home. Such confusing messages to the child lead to transgenerational conflict”. I have also experienced something similar when my family and I was adjusting to the new American culture. At school, I saw that individualism was favored by other students and slowly stopped practicing some of the collectivist values that my parents shared. At home, I started to question the Asian’s value of family obligation over individual pursuits, which caused conflict in the family because that was not typical of a dutiful

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