Funds for Mental Health : LARRY LUE
These are the horror stories: The wife takes all the kids with her and drowns them and the husband says, “We went to counseling once but we didn’t have a Chinese language counselor . . . so we gave up the counseling. My wife got more depressed, the kids just seemed to get more out of control. She was isolated. And there wasn’t a Chinese counselor.”
We need more funding to help immigrants who are highly functioning, experiencing the normal stresses of life, dealing with the problem of living in America--those who haven’t contemplated suicide or killing their four kids because they can’t handle the intergenerational conflicts anymore.
In mental health, we always keep hoping for that brighter day. Well, obviously, after this budget, this is not the year of the brighter day.
When you talk about so many base programs suffering--all the police, the fire departments, welfare, health services--it’s hard to say, “Well, we’ve still got to set aside this money for mental health.”
Asian agencies have to advocate and really educate about our emerging needs.
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