The trauma from that period of time persisted for him and his family even after they settled in the United States. In that time, the passengers were attacked by pirates three times, and they reached the point of hunger where people began talking about killing others for food, he said. He recalled his own experience as a kid of being out at sea on a fishing boat with more than two dozen others for nearly 30 days. Many escaped via boat or foot, experiences that are often a source of trauma for refugees, he said. Hoang was among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled Vietnam after the end of the Vietnam War. ![]() Available data on mental health issues facing Vietnamese refugees - much of which is several years to more than a decade old - show that they suffer from issues including PTSD and panic disorder.īut Hoang said there is a lack of services that account for the unique experiences of the community, which affects both community members in need and the limited number of bilingual and bicultural providers that are able to serve them. The experiences of fleeing war-torn nations has had a lasting impact on refugees’ mental health.Ī 2015 study in the journal Psychiatric Services found that 97% of Cambodian respondents met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. en masse after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the 1979 fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, under which more than 2 million people died. Vietnamese and Cambodians began migrating to the U.S. In nearby Long Beach, Cambodians constitute an estimated 20,000 of the city’s population. It’s a similar circumstance faced by the Cambodian community, which in 2010 accounted for about 7,000 of Orange County’s population, according to census figures at the time referenced in a report by nonprofits Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Orange County and Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance. But there’s a strong stigma attached to mental health in the community, and members aren’t always able to access the type of services they need. The need for mental health services in the Vietnamese community is high, Hoang said. He also established the group in part to create a space of support for bilingual and bicultural Vietnamese mental health providers. So in 2008, he founded Viet-CARE, a group of mental health professionals working to end the stigma attached to mental health and to address mental health disparities. “It was very scattered and people were working in silos,” Hoang said. He said he arrived surprised to find that neither of those things existed. Hoang had hoped to find more groups that served the Vietnamese community and more support for providers in Orange County, given its Vietnamese population of approximately 200,000, according to the 2010 census. It was something he tried to remedy by getting involved in local politics to advocate for more resources. Demand was high because there was a lack of providers serving the Vietnamese community, he said. In the Midwest, he had seen clients who drove up to six hours once a month - even through blizzards - for his services. Findings will be publicly disseminated to continue building community dialogue and awareness on this topic and could serve as a framework for developing similar interventions for other contemporary refugee communities.Paul Hoang moved to Orange County in 2007 after a taxing work year as a mental health clinician in Illinois. ![]() ![]() ![]() A combination of first-person methods (i.e., focus groups, individual interviews, evaluation forms) and third-person methods (i.e., a witness form) will be used to gather data on the intervention’s impact on individual well-being, community awareness on intergenerational trauma, and perceptions on the suitability of mindfulness for healing intergenerational trauma. The intervention, which will include components of psychoeducation, storytelling, genograms, community dialogue, and mindfulness practices, will be delivered to a multigenerational, bilingual adult Vietnamese-American sample of up to 40 participants. This project aims to support a community-led development, implementation, and evaluation of a mindfulness-based intervention for healing intergenerational trauma among Vietnamese-Americans. Ample evidence supports that intergenerational trauma is an embodied experience that could be healed through mindfulness practices focused on cultivating interoception. Despite its prevalence among Vietnamese Americans, no research has been done to explore interventions which could promote healing from intergenerational trauma and building resilience in this community. Intergenerational trauma occurs when the traumas that occurred to one generation have an impact on the health and wellbeing of future descendants.
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