Studies show mental health illnesses are on the rise among Asian Americans, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic. To help reduce those rates, a St. Louis-based civic youth organization created a statewide database with over 40 Asian and Pacific Islander therapists.

Student interns with the Missouri Asian American Youth Foundation created the mental health directory a few years ago to help reduce the stigma around mental health among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and promote mental wellness.

The database features culturally and linguistically competent Asian mental health providers across Missouri who speak a dozen languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Urdu, Kannada, English, Thai, Telugu and Vietnamese.

Sometimes finding a professional therapist can be overwhelming because they might not always be of the same race or have some familiarity with your culture, said Jun Zhao, a social work graduate student at Washington University.

“[With] this map, they know that we have resources that include Asian American and Pacific Islander therapists, and it can inform them very easily and quickly,” said Zhao, who also helped create the database.

To make the information more accessible to people seeking therapy, the database also includes the provider’s credentials, specialties, age group, language spoken, contact information, costs and types of visits available. It also lists the types of insurance some providers accept. A help guide comes along with it that offers an explanation of what each provider’s professional acronyms behind their names stand for.

Zhao, who is Chinese, said one of the most common stigmas about mental health in Asian culture, especially in China, is that if a Chinese person seeks therapy, they would be looked upon as physically and mentally weak or not good enough. Getting therapy could also potentially bring shame to their families if people found out that they were seeing a mental health specialist.

According to Zhao, going to the doctor for teenage or relationship issues is not common in China. People will think you have a severe mental illness if you want to talk to a therapist for depression or anxiety, and that you should go to the hospital for that type of treatment, she said.

“We actually know all mental health issues are not similar,” Zhao said. “But actually, in China, most people are teaching that they are the same things.”

There are also different beliefs about mental health issues among various age groups within the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Zhao said some older generations within the communities believe that instead of seeing a therapist, a person who is stressed or depressed should simply lie down and relax.

According to the Asian American Psychological Association, prior to the pandemic, only about 9% of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders suffered from anxiety or depression symptoms, but that spiked to over 40% in the last few years. Since 2022, the foundation saw that most people were seeking therapy for various mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. More recently, the foundation is seeing more Asian therapists in Missouri offer services to meet the mental health demands of young people and the elderly, who focus on adolescent development and complex relationships.

Finding a good therapist can be hard, especially if you are unfamiliar with the process and you have family members who discourage the use of therapy, said Saish Satyal, who also helped create the database.

“If you’re struggling with depression and the thing that people with depression often face is the lack of basic stuff, this is going to be such an overwhelming task,” he said. “We thought the idea would be to make that task as less overwhelming as possible.”

Satyal, who is Nepalese-American, said he struggled with panic attacks while studying at Washington University. The recent graduate who majored in psychology said he did not know how to explain to his parents that he needed to seek therapy. He went online and combed through a few websites, but did not find an Asian therapist. The therapist Satyal chose was not Asian; however, he said she was a good therapist but sometimes he had to explain cultural things to her that he wished he had not needed to.

“There were certain instances in which I’m talking about my family and I’m not going to call it trauma, because that’s just how they are and that’s not how I would define it,” Satyal said. “I think the importance of cultural competency kind of lies in how likely you are to have the same definitions for certain experiences and the same definitions then for cognitive processes and traumas, etc.”

Satyal said the therapy database can also be a starting point to help young Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders begin conversations about mental health with their parents, which is what he did to help convince his parents that therapy was similar to a routine doctor’s appointment.

“We aren’t able to provide direct therapy to people, but even out of those people who were able to use it (the database), I think it’s a major step in people getting the care that they need,” he said.