'She was unable to talk to a counsellor who fully understood her culture and language,' said Ruchika Bajaj of the Coalition of Asian American Children and Families, as she testified in December at a New York state assembly hearing on suicides in ethnic groups.
'The mental anguish of the rape became too overwhelming for Sonia,' Bajaj said. 'Without a social support network and appropriate medical and mental health services to provide assistance, she felt that suicide was her only option.'
Sonia was in her mid twenties.
'The stigma of needing help to deal with traumatic events and mental health issues prevents many women from seeking care for depression and suicide,' Bajaj said in her testimony.
The hearing, first reported in The New York Times, focused on Hispanic and Asian Americans. In the former group, young women ran a high risk of attempting or committing suicide. And in the latter, it was the elderly women who were most at risk.
Asian women 65 years and older in New York have a suicide rate of 11.6 per 100,000 -- -more than the rate for non-Hispanic, white women in that age group, psychiatrist Lloyd I Sederer, the executive deputy commissioner of the City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, told the assembly.
Both Bajaj and Sandeep Bathala of Sakhi for South Asian Women -- a women's organisation based in New York -- provided no statistics about Asian women, or, for that matter, Asian immigrants. About 30,000 Americans kill themselves each year, according to many suicide prevention groups. And an estimated 500,000 people survive suicide efforts, some having changed their mind at the last minute.
In 2000, suicide was the 11th leading cause of death in America, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Specifically, 10.6 out of every 100,000 people killed themselves, it added. Suicide deaths outnumber homicide deaths 5:3.
Though the clinic where Sonia received care is one of a handful providing services in Asian languages, it did not have adequate resources to realise the magnitude of her problems. 'These clinics are not sufficient to meet the needs of the community,' Bajaj added.
'Recently, one of the only South Asian language adult mental health clinics in New York City closed its doors,' Bajaj continued. 'Clients speaking Bengali and other lesser-known Asian dialects are now left to rely on inconsistent interpretation through telephone language lines or on family members. Often, many of these individuals find themselves relying heavily on their children or other family members to interpret medical information presented by the physician, often leading to misinterpretation of the information. The lack of knowledge about Asian Pacific American languages and cultures can often lead to misdiagnosis and inability to provide proper mental health care. We must reduce language and cultural barriers to ensure that Asian Pacific American women receive the necessary care in a timely manner,' she added.
Bathala echoed those views.
"Our presentation was based on anecdotal evidence but we surely have been seeing increasing signs of depression and attempted suicides in our communities," Bathala said. "Organisations such as Sakhi are primarily helping move them from abusive relationships and to create a new life for them. We need more funding and resources to help people with psychological problems and suicidal tendencies. That includes health care providers who can speak, to start with, Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil. They must also know the cultural ethos of the patients."
South Asian social workers and psychiatrists dealing with depression and suicidal impulses say that efforts are not being made to gather and scrutinize statistics of South Asians, including Indians with suicidal problems.
"If you look around, you hear stories, and read occasional news reports of not only elderly Indian women but young ones committing suicides but we ought to get more specific information and refine it," said Aruna Jha, a researcher and a clinician at the University of Illinois.
"We have dealt with families where young men have killed themselves, too. In many studies, South Asians are either being ignored because there are professionals out there who believe in the model minority myth and that everything is fine in a prosperous society," she added. South Asians are being omitted from research studies, she said, and often they are lumped with Asian Americans at large.
Over a decade ago, a Harvard-bound Indian teenager killed herself by throwing herself before a train on Long Island. Also killing herself with the Indian student was her friend, a Chinese immigrant's daughter.
Jha said immigrant communities have a large degree of vulnerability, and within the immigrant community, the younger members felt more pressure. People often hear of the suicides in a South Asian family only when there is a sensational element, she said, adding that the problem is far bigger than one can imagine.
Last May, Jha and a group of Asian Americans, including Shailey Merchant whose former boyfriend had killed himself not too long ago, started the Asian American Suicide Prevention Initiative. About 20 family members who had lost near ones to suicide attended a meeting called Seeking the Light in Chicago.
