Parental socialization of mental health in Chinese American families: What parents say and do, and how youth make meaning.

Parental mental health socialization is a process by which parents shape how youth develop and maintain beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors regarding mental health and help-seeking behaviors. Although culture shapes parental mental health socialization, few studies have examined specific parental socialization practices regarding mental health and help-seeking, especially as a culturally anchored process. Using a qualitative approach, this study explores youth-reported parental socialization of mental health within Chinese American families by examining focus group data from 69 Chinese American high school and college students. Findings revealed that youth received parental messages that conveyed culturally anchored conceptualizations of mental health that included stigmatized views of mental illness and perceptions of mental distress as not a legitimate problem. Parents responded to youth distress in culturally consonant ways: by encouraging culturally specific coping methods, dismissing or minimizing distress, or responding with silence. Youth engaged in the active interpretation of parental messages through cultural brokering, bridging the gap between their parents' messages and mainstream notions of mental health and help-seeking. Overall, our findings point to the significant role of culture in parental mental health socialization in Chinese American families and the need to integrate culturally specific understandings of mental health into future interventions for Asian American youth.

Epistemic trauma and transracial adoption: Author(iz)ing folkways of knowledge and healing.

BACKGROUND: Despite contested definitions, trauma is often conceptualized as an event that shocks or overloads human systems, shaping memory and meanings as the body and mind attempt to cope and survive. Adoption is often the presumed redress for childhood trauma. Thus, few scholars have examined how, or if, some conditions of adoption or the status itself might involve unique traumas or adversities. OBJECTIVE: In this paper, I argue that the condition of being transracially adopted can represent intersectional minoritized statuses, which in turn activate potentially distinct formations of epistemic trauma- structurally and relationally transmitted harms to a person as a knower and to their capacities for claiming, making sense of, and healing through their lived experiences. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: I draw from my personal and professional standpoints as a black, mixed-race, woman who was transracially adopted from public foster care as an infant, became a child welfare caseworker and later, a child welfare scholar. METHODS: Using a critical and reflexive autoethnographic method I ask how theories of epistemic injustice might help to highlight conditions tied to the status "transracial adoptee" that distinguish adoption-specific trauma. By reflexively analyzing my experiences in the context of extant theory and research, this paper brings theories of epistemic injustice into conversation with an emic perspective on adoption. RESULTS: In my experience, "transracial adoptee" and "mixed race" operated as statuses that occasioned epistemic injustices. I propose these conditions can become traumatic when they chronically and structurally disenfranchise claiming and cultivating folkways essential to one's healing and resilience across the life course. CONCLUSIONS: This paper is a call to invest in advancing epistemologies of adoption and theories of trauma that are anchored within diverse adoption experiences. I also invite future scholarship to explore epistemic injustice in adoption as trauma, and to identify and disrupt the many spaces in which it may be enacted culturally, relationally, familially, and in a society through its laws, policies, practices, and scientific knowledge.

Promoting Recovery Identities Among Mothers with Histories of Addiction: Strategies of Family Engagement.

Changes in identity are critical to managing transitions to recovery from substance and alcohol addictions. Identity change is particularly important for mothers, whose recovery processes are often in the context of critical but complex family relationships and societal expectations. But research and practice often underestimate the relational dimensions that promote or inhibit changes in one's identity during recovery. Here we analyze data from a study that involved interviews with 30 formerly incarcerated women participating in a community-based substance use treatment program in the Midwest. Drawing from Constructivist Grounded Theory Methods, our analysis identified three factors shaping levels of engagement with family members: (1) the relational consequences of a shared past; (2) ascribing permanence to the old identity of "addict" versus the ability to see women's capacity to change; and (3) the current provision of caregiving support to participants' children. Our analysis supports and extends existing research by highlighting how family can both promote and inhibit a recovery identity process. We discuss potential implications for theorizing "recovery" and "identity" as relational and identify key elements to support practices more attuned to the hidden complexity of family support.

Los cambios de identidad son fundamentales para manejar las transiciones hacia la recuperación de las adicciones a las sustancias y al alcohol. El cambio de identidad es particularmente importante para las madres, cuyos procesos de recuperación son generalmente en el contexto de relaciones fundamentales pero complejas y de expectativas sociales. Pero la investigación y la práctica con frecuencia subestiman las dimensiones relacionales que promueven o inhiben los cambios en la propia identidad durante la recuperación. Aquí analizamos los datos de un estudio que consistió en entrevistas con 30 mujeres previamente encarceladas que participaron en programa comunitario de tratamiento contra el consumo de sustancias en el centro de los Estados Unidos. Basándose en métodos de muestreo teórico constructivista, nuestro análisis identificó tres factores que moldean los niveles de compromiso con los familiares: (1) las consecuencias relacionales de un pasado en común; (2) la atribución de permanencia a la antigua identidad de "adicto" frente a la habilidad de ver la capacidad de las mujeres para cambiar; y (3) la facilitación actual de ayuda con el cuidado de los niños de los participantes. Nuestro análisis respalda y amplía las investigaciones actuales destacando cómo la familia puede promover e inhibir un proceso de identidad de recuperación. Debatimos las posibles implicancias para la teorización de la "recuperación" y la "identidad" como relacionales e identificamos elementos clave para apoyar prácticas más adaptadas a la complejidad oculta del apoyo familiar.