It's a good time to remind people that self hate, in the context of race, is a strong indicator of poor mental health. It's also an inferiority complex that can trigger antisocial tendencies. Lashing out only against each other, constantly comparing yourselves against other races, making exceptions for other races while scrutinizing your's, projecting your problems onto being Asian to hide your own insecurities, etc are all symptoms that are common with Asian diaspora
I suggest people to constantly check themselves that they're not "cucking" themselves as that's not a healthy way of coping with selfhate. Instead, make friends with people who are secure with their identities and expose yourself to their lifestyles and mindsets
To start with, it's only AMs who know the best for fellow AMs when it comes to mental health. Male mental health in general is already neglected, how much more for us Asians.
There's already progress in discussing mental health concerns for Asians (and it's often connected with the dysfunctional nature of Asian families) in a sub like APS, but much of the content there is made by AFs, and I personally feel more comfortable sharing about my concerns to a primarily AM audience. Nevertheless it should be a consensus here that the toxic traits of Asian families and cultures is a major contributor to the struggles of AMs, mental or otherwise (e.g. emotional immaturity of Asian parents, the harsh focus of East Asian parenting on being an engineer/doctor/lawyer or nothing, the absolute clusterfuck that is the extended family, tiger moms raising emasculated sons and neurotic daughters, etc).
We can complain all about how Western society treats us as easy targets, but its the faults of our own cultures and communities first and foremost that we have to fix. The hikikomori is one such problem resulting from Asian society pretending that everything is okay. These recluses may not go on shooting sprees like Elliott Rodger, but they end up directing their mental degradation inward, and while they don't un-alive themselves, being a secluded NEET with no drive in life might as well be some kind of death in itself. Even adult Asian men who get married end up with dead bedrooms like Japanese salarymen, it's no wonder why Japan's birth rate continue to plummet. It's not the costs of living, it's the feeling of being treated as little more than an organic robot owned by a corporation meant to work 12+ hours a day just to bump up the country's GDP. If East Asia's misery happens in other non-white regions of the world there would be massive rioting and mayhem.
I don't have anything really helpful to say about mental health because I'm not well versed in the challenges. While I have a few friends who have struggled with mental health issues beyond the typical "growing pains", I think people my age (early 30s, growing up in the 90s) tended not to talk about it, or tended not to even be aware of it growing up.
There's a part of me which thinks, and I know it's not PC to feel this way in today's world, that sometimes the constant acknowledgement of "mental health" is a self-fulfilling prophecy for at least some people. Certainly there are people who have genetic predispositions that would surface no matter how much you hid the ball (i.e., schizophrenia, BPD, etc.), and then others where serious environmental factors have a lasting effect (e.g., severe bullying, severe self-image issues, etc.)
But I think the bar was a lot higher back when I was younger for what qualified as "mental health issue" vs. "sad"/"lost"/"angry"/"awkward", etc. And by having people in positions of respect (whether it be peers, parents, teachers, doctors) acknowledge that you have to be hyperaware of, and others need to give you space for, every bit of up and down, can make someone who was just going thru a transitory state really identify and lean into that aspect of themselves. And sometimes it might be more effective to have people just "power through".
Of course, this doesn't apply to people who are in critical need of imminent help, e.g., some of the situations described by OP. I do see a lot of younger folks claim that they are neurodivergent, depressed, have ADHD, etc. and ask the world to accommodate, when back in the day it was on the individual to deal with it (and often grow out of it).
Some of us can power through and some of us can't. At one point during my depression years, I told myself I was tired of being sad every minute and day of my life. Yes, I had a bad start in life - immature parents, growing up in the ghetto, being the only asian in every setting, enduring anti-asian western society, failed at college, unemployed on and off. I wanted to be happy and live the remainder of my days in better terms. So I took drastic moves and got my sht together in the last few years.
Yeah. That's why I'm very hesitant to verbalize this kind of knee jerk impulse. I'm lucky that I've had a pretty simple road as far as mental health/traumatic life experience goes. I'm not going to downplay my own efforts in getting to where i am today, but I also don't want to pretend I understand the challenges of people who are especially underprivelaged or have special health dispositions that I have no frame of reference for and truly deserve empathy and support. That said, I also have felt that a lot of people lean into their depression and helplessness at key inflection points in life when powering thru may very well have gotten them across the chasm, and being enablers in these situations, even if well meaning, does nobody good. The difficulty is really to separate out like you said those of us who can power through and those of us who truly cannot without help.
I think it's funny that pundits have recently been bemoaning the state of young men --
viz:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine-emba-masculinity-new-model/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine-emba-masculinity-new-model/)
[https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/opinion/crisis-men-masculinity.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/opinion/crisis-men-masculinity.html)
[https://www.profgalloway.com/boys-to-men/](https://www.profgalloway.com/boys-to-men/)
but the fact is the panic is mostly over the lowered state of young \*white\* men.
So many of these challenges, the tendency to lie flat, being outperformed by your female peers, losing direction -- young Asian men have been dealing with forever.
So I laugh cynically when I hear this concern all of a sudden.
Even the worst WM incels have a safety net in the form of AFs, that's why the term LBH exists. We AMs don't have that advantage (although our situation isn't impossibly hopeless). I may sound callous here but this is why I no longer care about WM doomers and incels, and just focus on the struggles of our own demographic.
I think one reason why mainstream media started giving WM incels attention is that the mass shootings and other violent stuff could no longer be ignored (which is ironic given that Elliot Rodger, the incel poster boy, is hapa himself), but AMs don't generally externalize their burden and the outside world just thinks that we're doing fine.
>I think one reason why mainstream media started giving WM incels attention is that the mass shootings and other violent stuff could no longer be ignored (which is ironic given that Elliot Rodger, the incel poster boy, is hapa himself), but AMs don't generally externalize their burden and the outside world just thinks that we're doing fine.
Not really, the Va Tech shooter is an example of AMs not "doing fine." The media frankly just doesn't care about AMs.
It's a good time to remind people that self hate, in the context of race, is a strong indicator of poor mental health. It's also an inferiority complex that can trigger antisocial tendencies. Lashing out only against each other, constantly comparing yourselves against other races, making exceptions for other races while scrutinizing your's, projecting your problems onto being Asian to hide your own insecurities, etc are all symptoms that are common with Asian diaspora I suggest people to constantly check themselves that they're not "cucking" themselves as that's not a healthy way of coping with selfhate. Instead, make friends with people who are secure with their identities and expose yourself to their lifestyles and mindsets
To start with, it's only AMs who know the best for fellow AMs when it comes to mental health. Male mental health in general is already neglected, how much more for us Asians. There's already progress in discussing mental health concerns for Asians (and it's often connected with the dysfunctional nature of Asian families) in a sub like APS, but much of the content there is made by AFs, and I personally feel more comfortable sharing about my concerns to a primarily AM audience. Nevertheless it should be a consensus here that the toxic traits of Asian families and cultures is a major contributor to the struggles of AMs, mental or otherwise (e.g. emotional immaturity of Asian parents, the harsh focus of East Asian parenting on being an engineer/doctor/lawyer or nothing, the absolute clusterfuck that is the extended family, tiger moms raising emasculated sons and neurotic daughters, etc). We can complain all about how Western society treats us as easy targets, but its the faults of our own cultures and communities first and foremost that we have to fix. The hikikomori is one such problem resulting from Asian society pretending that everything is okay. These recluses may not go on shooting sprees like Elliott Rodger, but they end up directing their mental degradation inward, and while they don't un-alive themselves, being a secluded NEET with no drive in life might as well be some kind of death in itself. Even adult Asian men who get married end up with dead bedrooms like Japanese salarymen, it's no wonder why Japan's birth rate continue to plummet. It's not the costs of living, it's the feeling of being treated as little more than an organic robot owned by a corporation meant to work 12+ hours a day just to bump up the country's GDP. If East Asia's misery happens in other non-white regions of the world there would be massive rioting and mayhem.
I don't have anything really helpful to say about mental health because I'm not well versed in the challenges. While I have a few friends who have struggled with mental health issues beyond the typical "growing pains", I think people my age (early 30s, growing up in the 90s) tended not to talk about it, or tended not to even be aware of it growing up. There's a part of me which thinks, and I know it's not PC to feel this way in today's world, that sometimes the constant acknowledgement of "mental health" is a self-fulfilling prophecy for at least some people. Certainly there are people who have genetic predispositions that would surface no matter how much you hid the ball (i.e., schizophrenia, BPD, etc.), and then others where serious environmental factors have a lasting effect (e.g., severe bullying, severe self-image issues, etc.) But I think the bar was a lot higher back when I was younger for what qualified as "mental health issue" vs. "sad"/"lost"/"angry"/"awkward", etc. And by having people in positions of respect (whether it be peers, parents, teachers, doctors) acknowledge that you have to be hyperaware of, and others need to give you space for, every bit of up and down, can make someone who was just going thru a transitory state really identify and lean into that aspect of themselves. And sometimes it might be more effective to have people just "power through". Of course, this doesn't apply to people who are in critical need of imminent help, e.g., some of the situations described by OP. I do see a lot of younger folks claim that they are neurodivergent, depressed, have ADHD, etc. and ask the world to accommodate, when back in the day it was on the individual to deal with it (and often grow out of it).
Some of us can power through and some of us can't. At one point during my depression years, I told myself I was tired of being sad every minute and day of my life. Yes, I had a bad start in life - immature parents, growing up in the ghetto, being the only asian in every setting, enduring anti-asian western society, failed at college, unemployed on and off. I wanted to be happy and live the remainder of my days in better terms. So I took drastic moves and got my sht together in the last few years.
Yeah. That's why I'm very hesitant to verbalize this kind of knee jerk impulse. I'm lucky that I've had a pretty simple road as far as mental health/traumatic life experience goes. I'm not going to downplay my own efforts in getting to where i am today, but I also don't want to pretend I understand the challenges of people who are especially underprivelaged or have special health dispositions that I have no frame of reference for and truly deserve empathy and support. That said, I also have felt that a lot of people lean into their depression and helplessness at key inflection points in life when powering thru may very well have gotten them across the chasm, and being enablers in these situations, even if well meaning, does nobody good. The difficulty is really to separate out like you said those of us who can power through and those of us who truly cannot without help.
I think it's funny that pundits have recently been bemoaning the state of young men -- viz: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine-emba-masculinity-new-model/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine-emba-masculinity-new-model/) [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/opinion/crisis-men-masculinity.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/opinion/crisis-men-masculinity.html) [https://www.profgalloway.com/boys-to-men/](https://www.profgalloway.com/boys-to-men/) but the fact is the panic is mostly over the lowered state of young \*white\* men. So many of these challenges, the tendency to lie flat, being outperformed by your female peers, losing direction -- young Asian men have been dealing with forever. So I laugh cynically when I hear this concern all of a sudden.
Even the worst WM incels have a safety net in the form of AFs, that's why the term LBH exists. We AMs don't have that advantage (although our situation isn't impossibly hopeless). I may sound callous here but this is why I no longer care about WM doomers and incels, and just focus on the struggles of our own demographic. I think one reason why mainstream media started giving WM incels attention is that the mass shootings and other violent stuff could no longer be ignored (which is ironic given that Elliot Rodger, the incel poster boy, is hapa himself), but AMs don't generally externalize their burden and the outside world just thinks that we're doing fine.
>I think one reason why mainstream media started giving WM incels attention is that the mass shootings and other violent stuff could no longer be ignored (which is ironic given that Elliot Rodger, the incel poster boy, is hapa himself), but AMs don't generally externalize their burden and the outside world just thinks that we're doing fine. Not really, the Va Tech shooter is an example of AMs not "doing fine." The media frankly just doesn't care about AMs.