Within the Asian American community, high pressure environments, which are created through high expectations and consistent feelings of inadequacy, can cause significant stress and mental health issues. Having felt similar feelings of the high pressure environment causing continual cycles of stress, anxiety, and depression, I felt compelled to dig into this, to see if this was truly a problem that many others within the Asian American community suffered with as well. Through my research, I found that among many Asian American teens stress were caused by high expectations from parents which created toxic high pressure environments at home alongside the model minority myth which created toxic environments amongst peers. 

 

The high pressure environment within our home creates significant feelings of stress because value is not placed on our own well-being or happiness but rather value is placed on our ability to achieve something. We are taught that in order to make our parents proud and to be valuable, we need significant academic achievements alongside excellent performance in anything that we are involved in from sports, music, arts, and even community service; we are expected to collect the most accolades, outperform our peers, and exhaust ourselves from the amount of time and work we put into improving our capabilities. While hard work is not necessarily something that is negative, it is the idea of needing to push oneself to the point of mental and physical exhaustion and to put your own achievements before your own well-being which becomes unhealthy and dangerous. On top of this, as I mentioned in my previous post about the stigmatization of mental health in Asian cultures, we are expected to deal with our struggles in silence and that any signs of showcasing a need for help are seen as weakness and shameful. 

 

In addition, Asian Americans face similar pressures of needing to achieve excellence due to the model minority myth. Stereotypes from society place expectations on Asian Americans to perform well academically and professionally, where we are expected to achieve outstanding grades and test-scores, outperform peers in certain STEM subjects, and ultimately land high paying, challenging jobs that turn into lucrative careers. Rather than feeling like we can pursue our true interests or give ourselves breaks, we are expected by peers and society to choose and excel in niche categories that society deems acceptable for us. When we do not fit these societal molds of the model minority myth, we become subject to racism, judgement, and jeers from peers and others that shame us for not living up to expectations. Yet, what is interesting, is that the model minority myth is not created by Asian Americans but is created by white society as a means to make Asian Americans feel invisible and as a means to create a false image that America is not racist since Asian Americans can excel academically and professionally. Often times, unfortunately, we as Asian Americans exacerbate this model minority myth by not only subjecting ourselves to it but subjecting our other Asian American peers to it.

 

As Asian Americans, we need to be aware of how we exacerbate these high pressure environments. Rather than feeling a need to compare ourselves to others, and compare our Asian American peers to each other, we need to support one another. We need to be there for one another when our households and society creates toxic environments for us. Together we can defeat the toxicity that drains our mental health.