Suicide rates among Asian American youth have risen sharply in recent years, with several subgroups appearing to be particularly vulnerable.
A new study finds that while suicide rates have increased by 72% among Asian men and 125% among Asian women over the past 25 years, the situation is even worse for some Asian American minorities and Pacific Islanders, including Vietnamese American youth who face particularly high risk.
On the surface, Asian American suicide rates may appear to be lower than other groups, said Anthony Bui, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and an author of the study, but lumping all Asian American groups together doesn't paint the whole picture.
Bui looked at suicide rates among Asian American youth (ages 15-19) and young adults (ages 20-24) from 2018 to 2022.
His report, published earlier this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics, found that Vietnamese American youth have a disproportionately high suicide rate of 10.57 per 100,000 people, while Indian American youth have the lowest suicide rate of any group studied, at 6.91 per 100,000 people.
In certain communities, a lack of resources in a language or shame around talking about mental health can be barriers to receiving care, he said.
“Southeast Asian communities have a lot of history over the last 50 years, migration and trauma,” Bui said. “I'm Vietnamese, and some of the words for mental health in Vietnamese are very, very stigmatized.”
The suicide rate for ethnic minority youth, which includes Pakistanis, Cambodians, Japanese and Thai Americans, combined was 13.37, the highest in the report.
The rise in suicide among Asian American youth is not unique to the past two decades — the U.S. population as a whole has seen notable increases over the past two decades — but the Asian American community faces unique factors that could be contributing to the sharp increase in recent years, Bui said.
“In the last decade in particular, there has been a much greater increase in xenophobia and anti-Asian hatred experienced by many in these communities,” he said. “The increased societal pressure to succeed can have a very negative impact on the mental health of these young people, potentially leading to increased depression and suicide.”
Racism during the coronavirus pandemic may also be a contributing factor, as it has prompted some Asian American families to buy guns for the first time, Bui said.
“I think some of these families feel safer with a gun,” he said, “but the danger of having a gun in the home is that it increases the risk of suicide and homicide.”
More research is needed to explain the stark disparities between different Asian communities, but there's an overall urgent need for language-specific and culturally appropriate mental health resources, he said.
“We have a youth mental health crisis going on right now,” Bui said, “and we really need to prioritise some of these high-risk groups… and we really need to take into account people's culture, language and family in our mental health treatment.”
