Being Asian with a different sexual orientation

When I told my parents I was queer at age 14, I hardly knew of any other gay/lesbian/transgender/queer people. I knew of the Top Twins and Ellen DeGeneres, and I'm sure some other "rumoured to be gay", famous musicians or actors, but those were all TV and movie people. I didn't know of any queers in real life. I certainly didn't know of any queer Asian people.

Sixteen years later, having done some queer youth work and community development work, I know a good bunch of queer Asian people, and from discussing our sexualities and genders, it seems there are sometimes tensions between who we are as Asian people, and our sexualities and genders.   

While many Asian families are supportive of whomever their children, parents, grandchildren and cousins are, many gay, lesbian, transgender and queer Asians struggle with sharing our sexuality and gender, with our families.  

Some of this is the feared prejudice that might come from heterosexual family members, and some is fearing that we will bring shame to our families. There might also be the fear of rejection and conflict. 

For some queer Asian people, it is not such a big deal that our families don't know about our sexual orientation or gender identity. It may be that these topics are just not talked about in the culture of our families, even if we were straight!   

Whatever the reason, not feeling like we can, or want to tell our families about our sexual orientation or gender identity, has some kind of impact on the depth of relationships with our families, and our relationships and family ties can become weaker and thinner because of this.

There are many organisations and resources that are useful if you are gay, lesbian, transgender or queer. And also useful even if you arent, so that you can support someone close to you like a grandparent, child, grandchild, cousin or sibling.

Rainbow Youth and Outline are good places to start for information and resources.

Guest blogger – name withheld

Why do I garden? Let me count the reasons...

By Steve Carter, Mental Health Promoter, Mental Health Foundation

We love gardening at the Mental Health Foundation. Even those without green thumbs can comprehend the value in a hands-on connection with our own little piece of nature.  

Last year we sold Go Potty seedlings as a fundraiser and we also supported the TV show Get Growing with NZ Gardener.  We support community gardening, gardens in schools, vege growing and all the associated spin-offs including farmers’ markets and food barter systems. Gardening is fun, healthy and, let’s face it, pretty zeitgeisty in these transition times. 

Why? 

Well, I’ll tell you what it means for me and I’ll use the Five Ways to Wellbeing framework (more info here) to describe it. 

Let me put my cards on the table (or onto the garden furniture):  I love my garden.  In fact, outside of music, gardening is possibly the single thing I would rather be doing above all else. I work on organic and no-dig principles, so it’s barely an effort, it costs very little and the returns are many-fold.   

Stuff just grows. Abundantly.  Indeed, you might say my garden is flourishing. 

So, five ways to a flourishing garden? 

CONNECT

It might be true that I spend a lot of my time alone in my own garden, but gardening implies community. Exchanges of ideas and advice, working bees, harvest parties and other nature-cycle celebrations – I might have only two green thumbs myself, but I am surrounded by a community of people who love to get their hands dirty and reap the rewards of a relationship with nature, with themselves and, most importantly, with others.   

All this before you even think to venture out to the local community garden, or the farmers’ market, or the edible gardening group (yes, we have such a thing in Brighton).  

Guerrilla gardeners, urban foragers – there’s a whole network out there if you choose to connect to it.  And, hey, gardeners here in Otautahi have even been ‘Greening the Rubble’, bringing colour and life to otherwise crumbling earthquake-stricken gaps in the community. 

KEEP LEARNING

Refining your skills as a gardener is a constant and ongoing process.  New techniques, new ideas, different perspectives all contribute to better and better seasons. For example, have you ever wondered why you seem to spend so much time weeding?  It’s almost as if the weeds want to be there, again and again drawing you into a battle for supremacy.   

But grab a book on organic gardening and you might find that they offer more benefit than harm. Taproots draw nutrients from deep within the ground, so leave the dock; nettles make a fine tonic used as tea and contain more iron than spinach; chickweed is one of the best compost activators your garden will grow for you.   

There are so many things to learn, it’s a lifetime’s journey.  What is mulch and how should I use it?  How do I make compost? Could I maximise my water usage from house to garden or even from the sky?  How can I give nature a helping hand? 

BE ACTIVE

Now this one is something of a no-brainer, even for a lazy, no-dig gardener like me.  Sure, I don’t spend heaps of time breaking my back breaking ground any more – and to a lot of people that’s the essence of gardening: mammoth, boring effort and drudgery. It needn’t be.  

But I’m always moving stuff around. I can walk miles just ambling around my garden (see TAKE NOTICE below), shifting mulch and compost, building raised beds, erecting a new chicken run.  And, rather than hosepipe fresh Canterbury artesian water on the garden, I have a complex rainwater collection system, an outside bath and a watering can and buckets. Lord knows how far I walk and how much weight the train of buckets and watering cans add up to, but I can tell you an hour watering the garden is as good a workout as you can get. Not to mention heading to the beach to collect driftwood and seaweed to bolster the resources of my patch. 

It’s an active, outdoor lifestyle with a healthy eating payoff at the end of it.  The bath under the stars is a pretty cool wind-down too. 

GIVE

Like I say, stuff just grows in my garden. Right now, lemons are literally throwing themselves off the tree faster than I can make marmalade, cordial or preserve them in salt and spices. Last year I had so much parsley I thought I might suffocate under the onslaught, and this year the patch has doubled in size.  My broccolini and spinach have become triffid-like to the point where I get tired of eating them. But “waste not, want not” right? 

The answer? Give it away.  Who doesn’t love free, fresh, organic veges and fruit? 

Not just that. I now save seeds from my best crops and they are yours if you want them. You want some advice on how to plan for a thriving garden?  I’m happy to give you as many tips as you need. It feels so good to share. 

TAKE NOTICE

It has been pointed out to me that I can spend hours in my garden doing nothing, but in truth I’m rarely doing nothing. What I enjoy most is a very conscious presence in the natural environment I have helped to flourish around me.   

I am fascinated by the life teeming just beneath the surface of my soil. I love to watch the bees buzzing around my flowers, doing their pollinating work for me. Is that a new patch of silverbeet that has established itself in a hitherto bare patch of ground? Is that little family of coriander emerging from the ground once more, ready to burst into tasty life? Is it time to feed my berries and fruit trees so that the tiny buds can explode into flower for a new season’s yield?   

The birds are singing, winter is cycling into spring and what seemed lifeless and still is flushing into the hope of life and colour. Nature is a dynamic, endless process of change and it is a wonderful thing to engage fully with a very mindful appreciation of its diversity and energy. 

So, that’s why I garden. What other activity can you think of that offers such an array of benefits to mind, body and spirit? You get to work at it, develop new skills and refine the ones you have. You get to share it with others and build a community of like-minded people around you. You even get to appreciate the days when the rain comes. And best of all, you will relish all the many returns for your (not very hard) labours. 

You don’t have to hug any trees or talk to the flowers (but you can if you want to).  

Be good to your garden and it will be good to you.  

Real value in working together

By Ivan Yeo, Mental Health Promoter, Like Minds, Like Mine

Many people ask me what Like Minds, Like Mine mental health promoters do. The answer is that, while our work is extremely varied, much of it involves running health promotion workshops in the community on subjects like how to identify and combat discrimination.

Another major part of the role is networking and finding opportunities for organisations to work together and support consumers and each other’s development.

As an example, just a few months ago, the Problem Gambling Foundation Asian Services (PGF), East Health Trust, Yan Oi Sei and Bo Ai She (Chinese consumer support groups), Counties Manukau District Health Board’s Asian Mental Health Unit (Te Rawhiti) and the Mental Health Foundation met to discuss how we can better support Chinese people with experience of mental illness (or consumers) in East Auckland.

As the result of the meeting, it was decided that Bo Ai She would run a Chinese language wellness recovery action plan* training session for Chinese consumers and family members. The training was completed at the beginning of June.

Each group had a different part to play in making this happen: PGF and the Mental Health Foundation initiated the meeting and East Health Trust provided the venue. Bo Ai She and the district health board supplied facilitators and training materials. Yan Oi Sei is providing ongoing family support to the participants as well as working to recruit more Chinese consumers.

Through this collaborative effort, the training was a fantastic success and was covered in the Chinese newspaper, The United Chinese Press.

As a mental health promoter, I find it heartening to be involved in a process that brings together a number of organisations with the aim of working together towards a stronger community.

This is just one of many examples of the work done by the Foundation’s 15 mental health promoters to make a positive difference to the mental health and wellbeing of New Zealanders.

*A wellness recovery action plan, also known as WRAP, is used by people with experience of mental health problems to increase their wellbeing and resilience. They work on their own, or with support from a peer, to devise a plan that suits their circumstances by monitoring, reducing and eliminating uncomfortable physical symptoms and emotional feelings. The plan incorporates information on developing a support system, using peer counselling, creative activities, journaling, diet, exercise, relaxation and getting a good night’s sleep. WRAP was developed  by Mary Ellen Copeland

First ever community mental health care centre opens in China

As a Kai Xin Xing Dong (Chinese Like Minds Programme) project worker, and coming from mainland China, I take a keen interest in what happens in China’s mental health service.

The first community mental health care centre started this year in Beijing. Community mental health centres play an important role between hospital and home, and a mental health system that links all three levels throughout the whole country gives people with experience of mental illness the best support in recovery.

The opening of this first centre is a very encouraging sign, but China’s mental health service still has plenty of room for improvement.

50% of China’s population knows nothing about mental health

Statistics released in early 2009 show there are over one hundred million people with mental health issues in China, and among them over 16 million people have experienced serious mental illness.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), suicide in China accounts for about a quarter of suicides worldwide, and our work tells us that undiagnosed and untreated depression is still the biggest risk factor for suicide. Yet more than 50% of China’s population knows nothing about mental health, and even fewer understand how to access the mental health services.
 
In China it is believed that people with experience of mental illness become ‘crazy’ or ‘foolish’ and they will never recover. Some people still think that people with experience of mental illness cause big safety issues. The recent spate of violent attacks in Chinese schools, which left dozens of children dead or injured, was attributed, by many, to mental illness.

China needs mental health act

These beliefs reflect the discriminatory attitude towards people with experience of mental illness in mainland China. Yet people can and do make a full recovery and this is why China needs a mental health act.

Mental health legislation was first drafted in China in the 1980s, with the aim to provide legal protection and subsidized health care to those with experience of mental illness. If passed, the legislation would give patients without family support access to free shelter and treatment provided by the government.

However, this would require a large amount of funds and, so far, only a few prosperous provinces and cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, have drafted regional regulations on mental health, leaving patients to depend largely on families for both financial and psychological help.

For now, we have to take heart that the first community mental health centre has opened and hope it will be the first step towards improving China’s services for people with experience of mental health issues.

Charlie (Sheng) Tang, Mental Health Promoter, Like Minds

Mindfulness – from therapy to wellbeing

Mindfulness as a therapeutic technique has grown in popularity in the past few decades and there is now a lot of evidence in support of its short and long term benefits.  This is perhaps unsurprising given that mindfulness develops beyond a technique for many people and instead becomes a complete framework for living.  Mindfulness, in other words, is a way of being in the world rather than simply another technique that we ‘add’ to our lives. 

In terms of therapy, this means that we don’t ‘take’ mindfulness as we would a pill.  Instead, being mindful means not denying or pushing away our current experience, but meeting it with an open curiosity. 

Mindfulness is cultivating the ability to be present for whatever is arising in our lives and learning to make friends with those experiences. Where before we may have reacted to painful emotional experience by (sometimes violently) pushing it away, now we have the ability to rest with those experiences and allow them to unfold their story.  We learn to ask “is it the experience itself that makes me uncomfortable or the way I respond that causes so much frustration and unease?” 

Beyond therapy, mindfulness helps us recognise and savour the wholesome moments that are already present in our lives. Often these are the quiet moments – they are so natural and smooth that they tend to slip by unnoticed. With mindfulness we touch these moments and we begin to taste the quiet joy that accompanies them.  With practise, the experience of joy and contentment grows and a way of life develops where open curiosity rather than closed-off anxiety becomes the norm. 

Helping others to appreciate these quiet moments and to rest with the rich fabric of life experience – in an open and non-judgemental way – is surely a positive and worthy goal of mental health promotion.

Grant Rix, Midlands Mental Health Promoter

Moving beyond Rambo and the Terminator - The way forward for men's wellbeing

When I was asked to attend the Men’s Wellbeing Symposium in Masterton last week, I agreed, but with some reservations as to what I was letting myself in for.

Controversy had preceded this symposium regarding its ‘men only’ status, but as the day proceeded it became evident this was a good decision by the organisers, and also essential if the symposium was to grapple with the question of men’s wellbeing. Women have been leading the way in this area for many years and now we men are trying to step up and catch up.

The symposium started off posing the question, “why are men over represented in poor mental health stats?” and we were challenged to go beyond the usual answers such as ‘men don’t ask for help’ or ‘men don’t talk about their feelings’ and to dig deeper, asking ourselves why?

Sydney-based keynote speaker Professor John MacDonald spoke about the work that’s been done in Australia on men’s health and the need to respond to men differently from women. For example, help lines where often the response to a caller is “How are you feeling?” simply doesn’t work, according to Professor MacDonald. He says that by changing one word in this opening sentence to “How are you doing?”, men stayed on the phone longer and were also more likely to call back.

The lack of male role models in the lives of young boys was also discussed in a session with Freerk Ykema from the Gadaku Institute in the Netherlands. Ykema says around the world, education, for example, had become female-dominated. Those who were male were often the principal or deputy principal and were seen as authoritarian figures, not mentors. With a significant number of young boys having no male presence in their home, male role models were often fictional characters like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo!

Freerk Ykema also talked about boys’ need for physical activity and how our education system of sitting behind desks is not conducive to a young boy’s learning. So the inevitable result is that the ‘disruptive’ boy who really just needs some physical activity is labelled the ‘problem’ child in class when the reality is, he’s not getting his basic learning needs met.

So, what was the outcome of all our male bonding?

Men need to redefine for themselves what they need to enhance their wellbeing, while services need to adapt and acknowledge the different male and female responses to the same issue or service. Men are not from Venus and women are not from Mars, we are all from Earth, but we do have innate differences and a ‘one glove fits all’ approach to both sexes does not work.

In New Zealand, we quite rightly prioritise our cultural response to Maori and Pacific peoples, especially as these groups feature disproportionately highly in negative socio-economic and health indicators. But we also need to start asking ourselves, in the health and education sectors in-particular, what are we doing to support men and young boys? This is not to ignore the needs of women and girls, but to acknowledge that these services have often developed to meet the needs of women, leaving men unable to identify or connect with them. What we need now is to incorporate both a female and a male response. When this happens, the question put by the symposium, “why are men over represented in poor mental health statistics?” may eventually become superfluous.

Rob Berg, Development Manager, Suicide Prevention Information New Zealand


Men’s Wellbeing Symposium programme

Associate Minister of Health Peter Dunne’s opening speech at the Men’s Wellbeing Symposium.

Mensline suspension

As someone who often receives requests for help from men in distress who are seeking information on where to go for help and support, I was very disheartened to hear the recent announcement of the suspension of Lifeline's Mensline, a national service that has been there for men for over 15 years.

We know that men in trouble are vulnerable and not good at reaching out for help, and Mensline was one of the few services there specifically for them.
 
You can hear more on this subject from Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon programme with Kathryn Ryan who interviews world suicide prevention expert Annette Beautrais, and Mensline founder Warwick Pudney http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/20100304

In Australia this service is funded by Government but this is not the case in New Zealand, with Mensline being funded through charitable grants and public donations, and staffed by volunteer counsellors.

As Annette Beautrais says, there needs to be a commitment to on-going suicide prevention funding and the loss of this service is a set back to both the suicide prevention and mental health sectors.

I think it is essential that Mensline is restored and hope that Lifeline will be able to do so sooner rather than later.

Russell Tuffery, Information Officer, MHF Resource & Information Service

Low-cost approaches to promote physical and mental health: theory, research, and practice

Edited by Luciano L'Abate. (2007)

This is a useful text for those involved in health promotion and related research and who want to clarify conceptual thinking about the place and effectiveness of physical and mental health promotion.

The book argues the need to make a clear distinction between health promotion and prevention. As the title suggests it points out the opportunities that promotion programmes provide due to their low cost, lack of bureaucracy and possibilities to significantly influence outcomes for large numbers of people. Such programmes are agued as an essential 'upstream' element to improve overall health and reduce ballooning care costs in the secondary and tertiary health domains.

Physical and mental health approaches to promotion are detailed, with chapters dedicated to descriptions of specific programmes and the analysis of their effectiveness. Having physical and mental health promotion included in the same book is very relevant with the increasing evidence reinforces the symbiosis between the two. Areas explored are diverse including nutrition vitamins and herbal medicines; exercise, mindfulness and expressive movement; creative and expressive writing; relationships and spirituality.

The examples are mainly from North American but there is sufficient diversity and creativity in the programmes described to capture the imagination for possibilities in New Zealand.

Hugh Norriss, Director of Policy & Development