Deepa Bharath is a member of the global religion team at The Associated Press, where she has worked for over a year. She is an award-winning newspaper reporter with more than twenty years of experience working for publications in Southern California. Before joining The Associated Press she was a staff writer for the Orange County Register with the Southern California News Group for over fifteen years and reported for the Daily Breeze before that. She was a Center for Health Journalism 2016 California Fellow and reported a Fellowship project on barriers to mental health care for various ethnic groups. She also received fellowships from the International Women's Media Foundation and the International Center for Journalists to report stories about reconciliation, counter-extremism and peace-building efforts around the world. She has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Stella Maris College, a master’s degree in mass communication from the University of Madras and a master’s in newspaper reporting from Syracuse University.
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In many Asian communities, mental illness remains mired in stigma. A reporter in Orange County, Calif. explores how members of Korean, Vietnamese and Arab communities are affected by this barrier to care.
Zuher Belal put a black pencil on the rectangular piece of paper stretched out on a table. The 21-year-old native of Syria drew a Muslim man with arms outstretched in prayer. Then, he drew an airplane dropping a bomb.
“The word we use for mental illness in Vietnamese is ‘crazy,’” Lanie Tran said. “If you’re a Buddhist, you believe you or your family members did something wrong in a previous birth. If you’re Catholic, you believe God is punishing you for something you did that was mean or wrong.”
The shocking call came a decade ago from campus police at UC Berkeley. Kwang Ho Kim's son, a straight-A student, had dumped all his clothes on the bed and set them on fire.
In ethnic minority communities in particular, mental illness is a serious problem since stigma too often prevents individuals from seeking and getting the help they need. But a handful of programs are making progress in overcoming these obstacles.