Finding Light In a New Land
Ivan Yeo is a mental health promoter for the Mental Health Foundation’s Kai Xin Xing Dong/Like Minds, Like Mine programme. He shares his experience of increasing understanding about mental illness and combating discrimination within the Chinese and Korean communities.
Transcript
IVAN YEO – MENTAL HEALTH PROMOTER – KAI XIN XING DONG/LIKE MINDS, LIKE MINE
Chinese New Year is always such a beautiful buzz - with your family, with your father. You know - people get together, having that support and love and feeling of belonging.
When you’ve migrated to a new country, imagine you take a plant and start, you know, planting the tree in a new soil. Even if people haven’t been through mental illness themselves, the thing about the migration process is it’s the same - how am I going to learn a new method and way to look after myself, and that will take time.
One of the things that we’re working with is to get out to the community. And the beauty of working as a group is when you have other health organisations there. If someone goes to a Chinese New Year stall and you only have mental health information resources, people are not going to go there and talk to you because, you know, like people are very aware of how other people might think about them, and even trying to avoid the stall. But when you have a stall with many organisations, with other health information, people don’t have that stigma attached to it because, for them, there also seems to be organisations who provide services to the community.
Currently we’re working with two groups – the first one is Chinese, and then the second one is Korean. The word ‘mental illness’ is really stigmatised, even more so than Chinese, in the Korean community.
They believe when someone has a mental illness, that’s it – their life, it’s finished; they’re not going to have a job, they’re not going to have a life partner and their life is over.
Also because of where they came from, they believe that person is going to be locked away and is going to bring shame into the family.
The word ‘I’ in the Eastern culture does not mean ‘I’ as an individual; when you say ‘I’ it actually that includes your whole family; it means your father, your mother, your children and all that.
So when a single person experiences something, especially like mental illness; that person has brought a stain into a white cloth and everybody will just focus on that. For that reason, it is hard for a family member to say, I have a son or daughter, or my partner has mental illness.
The fifth Chinese newspaper campaign that we put together, we had had several calls. I had a lady who called me and told me that she read the article, and she felt that she needed help. That takes a lot of courage, especially when it’s a relatively small community and you never know who is going to answer the call – that could be someone you know. To have that courage and make the phone call and say ‘I’ve been feeling this way for a long time, and because of your articles, now I’m considering getting help'.
My dream is really to have people who know that there are services out there to support them.
I think support is hard. I always encourage people, you know, like just be there; seriously, just be there. Just to have one person in their life, believe in them when they don’t feel there’s a hope, when they don’t feel there is a possibility there to carry on.
It’s all right to be sad; it’s all right to feel you need some space by yourself, and let them know, that I will be there for you always. Human beings are human beings first - not the diagnosis, not the names, not their colour, but purely just human beings.
We are all in the same country. If we really want to have a better future for anyone, actually it’s to be a better community.
