Very little is known about psychiatric disorders in the growing South Asian ethnic subgroup within North America. Cultural factors can have a considerable impact on the pathogenesis, clinical expression, help-seeking patterns and response to treatment among Indians and other South Asian immigrants and their families. I by no means believe myself to be an expert, but hope to shed some light on the unique facets of mental health treatment among the South Asian population. I am hoping by identifying the dysfunction, someday the stigma will be alleviated.
Adoption is a particularly sensitive subject within the South Asian population, especially for the child that is adopted. Children who are adopted live with the knowledge that their adoptive parents wanted them very much, so much that they went to great lengths to bring them into their family. It is under the mental health label because in my experience, many children also carry the ongoing, nagging fear that someone didn't want them, rejected them, cast them out for reasons that are not known and are frightening.
This experience is particularly intensified for South Asian youth being raised by their South Asian adopted parents because our community stresses family connections over any other qualification of a person. South Asians find their identity through their race, religion and family background. As such, adopted children are then held to the stigma of not having a family lineage, and almost always being subjected to the assumption that they were the "bastard" child that wasn't wanted and as such given for up adoption. Many of these children and adolescents are developing heightened feelings of anxiety and culpability in their not being kept by their birth parents.
Treatment for these children and adolescent is difficult and marred with the constant setback of being subjected to narrow-mindedness from members of their own community who hold their being adopted as something akin to a scarlet letter that shows their ineligibility to befriend or belong in the South Asian community. So what’s the treatment? Parenting classes for the adopted parents to debrief them on the social concerns that arise from adoption and how they can develop healthy self-esteem in their adopted children through unconditional love and a feeling of belongingness to the adopted family. However, if the parents are concerned about "what others will think" and constantly hold the adoption over the child's head as some favor they did to this child, he or she will grow up feeling obligated to the adopted parent and the community that will never accept them as one of their own.
