Session: Beyond the Biomedical Framework of Mental Health: Alternative Avenues of Mental Health Knowledge and Help Seeking Among Asian American and Latinx Young Adults (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Racial disparities in mental health continue to persist, with Asian and Latinx Americans reporting the lowest rates of engagement in formal mental health services. To date, research has primarily examined the underutilization of mental health services from perspectives of the biomedical model of illness that conceptualizes mental health problems as a disorder requiring professional treatment to treat its causes and symptoms. However, the biomedical model, which purports Western notions of mental health knowledge including the definitions of illness and related treatments, may not be useful or applicable to racially and ethnically diverse populations whose perspectives are shaped by unique cultural beliefs, values, practices, and norms that shape how illness is characterized and treatment is understood.

Limited research has examined the explanatory models of illness that guide the mental health beliefs and pathways to help seeking among racially and ethnically diverse populations. We call for a paradigm shift in the ways that mental health knowledge is created and applied to the assessment and treatment of racially diverse populations. This paper symposium addresses this call through a collection of papers that examine culturally and contextually specific pathways to treatment engagement among Asian American and Latinx populations. The first paper uses longitudinal data to examine how influences from multiple levels, including systemic racism, familial cultural values, and stigma impact the help seeking attitudes of Asian American young adults. The second paper utilizes survey data to examine the how structural barriers such as lack of mental health knowledge and access to services intersects with cultural barriers (e.g. cultural stigma of mental health) to affect attitudes towards professional mental health services among Chinese American young adults. The third paper examines culturally construed mental health knowledge (folklore knowledge) and approaches to help seeking that are passed down from generation to generation through a newly developed survey on parental mental health socialization, and explores how parental messages on mental health impact Asian American young adults’ perceptions of mental illness and use of mental health services. The final paper examines data from interviews to explore the nuanced role that non-western ways of knowing inform Latinx and Asian American immigrant families’ conceptualizations of mental health.