8 Asians

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• Danny_Ahmed

  They’re both heavy topics to talk about.

  A lot of young people go through mood swings, and when it develops into depression (mild to severe forms), there’s quite a bit that goes on. Some people go with genetics, brain chemistry, environment, social pressures, etc. Most people do wish for a simple answer, but most of the time it isn’t.

  One of my psych instructors mentioned before that a somewhat straight forward distinction between the clinical depression and mood swings is how it affects your daily functions. Like, if depress moods lasts for weeks, can’t eat, sleep, work, etc. Or if other things occur like drug use or reckless behavior.

  I grew up in an Asian church environment and visited several different groups (Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese-American). From what I experience and remember, religion doesn’t necessarily cause or “cure” per se. More like, each young person’s moods had reasons outside of religion, and if religion did had some affect, it was mostly through their interactions with family. Like some devout relatives or elders might put pressures or other unhealthy influences on the young people. Sometimes, relatives or elders use the Christian religion as an excuse to justify the infamous strict Asian raising. Other than that, there isn’t much that religion did to a lot of young Asians, in terms of their mental health.

• Danny_Ahmed

  Looking back, I think if there was one thing a lot of young Asian people needed, it was probably effective communication. I saw and still see issues arise in young Asians mainly because very little people communicated well with them. With their family members, sometimes there’s language barriers, generational and cultural gap, and other tensions. Also with social pressures added in, it can become hectic for any person. With better communication, it won’t solve everything, but it will do a lot of work. Speaking honestly here.

  With religion, especially Christianity, a lot of Asian churches have many issues, but I won’t go into that. Despite the rap it gets in today’s society (also from me, since I left the church) there’s a lot of important lessons which religion can help quite a bit. Like counting your blessings, even for the small stuff, can do plenty for people trying to make it through the end of the day.

• ellebee11

  from a personal perspective and experience.

  fact 1) i got sucked into the whole Asian Christian community in jr high/highschool

  fact 2) my parents were NOT super religious – they attended church regularly but mainly for social reasons – they didn’t pressure me to go.

  fact 3) i became SUPER depressed in HS, thinking about suicide daily, coincidentally at the same time I began reading the Bible daily and praying daily. In fact, I think many of my prayers were asking the Big Man if I could just die. I felt so helpless and hopeless all the time. I actually saw a counselor a few times – that was a big sobfest disaster.

  fact 4) I had no “tragic” incidents in my life. my grades were excellent, my life “on paper” was fine, my family was fine, I had a boyfriend, I played on sports teams, I hung out a lot w/ Church friends, etc etc….

  fact 5) Once I just said “F**K it!” in college and drew away from the Church scene and took control over my life…… voila – I felt tons better and didn’t feel so bad about myself all the time. It was like I was free.

  fact 6) and I have never looked back since, and it’s been about 15 years. A few times in my 20′s I visited a church here and there and sat in on a small group, or would go w/ a friend to a social gathering which happened to be w/ their church friends….and in those environments, all those feelings would rush back and I would hate being there. It was suffocating.

• http://www.bigwowo.com/ bigWOWO

  @ellebee11 HAHA! Elle, that’s great!

  I agree with you 100%. I was raised as a fundie. My life was depressing as hell when I had JC as my personal savior and believed that there was some higher being above me with a “hell lever” that could make the floor beneath me give way and toss me into the fire along with the gays, abortionists, Buddhists, and other so-called “sinners.”

  Then when I realized it was all a bunch of hokey imperialistic voodoo, life got better. They should have an “it gets better” campaign for fundamentalist Christian kids.

• http://thylacine.livejournal.com/ ErikaHarada

  I don’t think religion directly relates to depression in teens…it’s a period of time when everyone is worried about the future and hormones are making you go crazy. I’m non-religious, and I went through similar things during school.

  Perhaps it relates to having a supportive network of friends and family? In some churches, people are more kind, open, and helpful to others. Others are not, and do more harm than good.

  Even in non-religious households or households of other religions, there is a big variance in terms of support, etc.

• mwei

  @Danny_Ahmed the solution is easy: ritalin and prozac – big pharma approves this message.

• ellebee11

  @bigWOWO Totally! one of us fundie-survivors should create a youtube PSA video regarding this. There are lots of lost AA-souls out there that are missing some of the best years of their lives b/c they are too busy singing praise songs at retreats. Don’t get me wrong – I think spirituality is good but something about the AA-Christian-cult that magnifies identity and self-esteem angst when you’re in your teens/20′s. Thinking back about my youth group leaders and such – I think to myself “OMG! I was looking up to these 22 year olds as mentors? WTF?” They were in no way equipped to be a role model for teens.

• http://www.bigwowo.com/ bigWOWO

  @ellebee11 Haha! “Singing praise songs!” That’s great!

  I remember a while back when I posted this:

  http://www.thefighting44s.com/archives/2008/04/10/proselytizing-on-campus-asian-american-style/

  What’s sad right now is that if you spend your time bowing, crying, and speaking in tongues, someone is going to catch it on his/her iPhone. So it’s actually much worse than it was for us.

• ellebee11

  @bigWOWO yes, it can definitely be worse. Or perhaps harder to be completely brainwashed since our time was right before the internet blew up. It was pretty sheltering since I couldn’t just log on and see what real kids were up to on youtube, etc. Now, everyone can view what the rest of the world is up to on their smartphones, so I wonder if its harder to keep youth groups reigned in? or do youth pastors install tracking devices on the kids phones? hmmmm. Is it a sin to sext? I don’t believe the big book specifies…..

• http://www.bigwowo.com/ bigWOWO

  @ellebee11 Matthew 5:28:

  “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

  I can only imagine that sexting has gotta be ten times worse. (It’s amazing the crap that I still remember from being hit in the head with a Bible so many times.)

  Do you know any Bible thumpers these days? My guess is that Bible Thumpers are probably like political extremists–they probably only go to the sites that support their belief in fundamentalism. After all, if it’s adultery to look at a woman lustfully, it also has to be a sin to think rationally. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at an issue rationally has already committed blasphemy against the entire world of Christian fundamentalist in his heart.”

• ellebee11

  @bigWOWO Wow. pretty impressive that you can still quote from the Big Book. I don’t remember anything – maybe I have repressed it all into a locked nook of my brain. I have lost touch w/ many of my friends from that era. However the last time I had lunch w/ a long-time friend of 25 yrs (!!) who is a bible banger, she gossiped about all these heavy issues of ppl in her small group. Issues like child abuse and molestation w/in the family. ick! I’m like, don’t ask for God’s help, ask for the POPO! The sh*t that goes on w/in these church groups is more scandalous than Penn State.

• http://www.bigwowo.com/ bigWOWO

  @ellebee11 Haha…”bible banger!”

  You know what the funniest thing is–and I think this is true no matter which group of fundies you talk to. The people who sin the most actually have the greatest sway among the congregation because they’re the ones commanding all the attention. I remember one guy who just couldn’t keep it in his pants. I think he knew four or five women in his church group in a Biblical sense, and I don’t mean by what he read in the Bible, even though he read the Bible all the time. Every time I started hearing the gossip about him, it was like, “Ben fell AGAIN.” But somehow God had an endless supply of forgiveness, and the congregation had an endless supply of interest, so Ben was the main dude in the Church.

• Danny_Ahmed

  @bigWOWO@ellebee11 um, did you really go to an Asian church back in the day?

• ellebee11

  @Danny_Ahmed@bigWOWO I have been to several different Asian churches back in the day, you can even say 4 different states too. And it was the same everywhere – so it’s not like I just went to one fluke crazy church. I even went on a youth group mission to some poor “city of the flying pigs” in Mexico to spread the Good Word when I was in highschool w/ a bunch of midwesterners, many of whom have never seen an Asian in real life before me. Oh, btw on this mission, one of the girls got deflowered by one of the boys, IN the Church during the middle of the night! Boy, she was singing praises the loudest on that bus after she confessed her sins. I sh*t you not. You simply cannot make this sh*t up! LOL.

• http://www.bigwowo.com/ bigWOWO

  @ellebee11@Danny_Ahmed Haha! I’ve never heard of it taking place IN the Church, but man, that would definitely be something to sing about! Elle, you probably took it a step further than I did with the mission thing. I was going to spread the Good Word in China, but then the Asian American in me kicked in and began to make me question if I was really helping “my people” by being part of the Bible crew.

  As for me, I was pretty much in one Chinese church for a big chunk of my young life, where I got a full dose of all the craziness, hypocrisy, and histrionics that I’ve heard is universal. In high school, I visited a Korean church where I learned the term “speaking in tongues” and actually saw a few people doing it, and at the tail end of high school, my family joined another Chinese church where it was similar to my original Chinese church, only they had a White pastor (my original Chinese church is now run by a White pastor married to an Asian woman whom he met while evangelizing in Taiwan). By this time, I’d begun to verbally question stuff, so I kinda got shown the door after memorizing verses and using the master’s tools to question the master.

  It was quite funny because the White pastor was open to my questioning, while the Chinese elders, one in particular, shouted at me, “How dare you question Pastor H—? You think you know more about God than him???” I responded by saying, “Well, look at what the Bible says.” I should’ve realized it was pointless, and I should’ve simply responded to him by speaking in tongues and claiming he was a godless heathen who didn’t understand tongues.

• Danny_Ahmed

  @bigWOWO@ellebee11 I also been in and out to a few other Churches, from the small Korean gathering to mega-mostly white places. I don’t know, my sense of belonging just wasn’t there.

• Danny_Ahmed

  @bigWOWO@ellebee11 Well , I guess since you all are ranting about the Church, for me, what I really hated was the hierarchy. I stayed in one church for like ever, but it didn’t do anything drastic until I got to my late teens. For the most part, it was just a social outlet and one of the 2 places in town that had any type of organization for Chinese culture (the other being the local major University and it’s affiliates, but they had issues too).

  During that time, an influx of bible college students came in, some Asian and some not. The pastor at that time was sort of into the RAD Christian thing, and he allowed a lot of these students take care of this or that function. It was ok at first, but I guess at that time, my mind was sort of still between rebellious but maturing and I saw a lot of stupid stuff. Sometimes hypocritical, but mostly it just got stupid to me and I couldn’t stand it.

  At first, I thought I could relate to these guys, because they were around my age and were open to discussing this or that (especially regarding Asian American youth issues because they were like the only ones in my town that would talk openly about it). I started to open up ( hopefully make real friends and possibly a potential other half), but due to a few incidents, got tore apart. Like, overtime, I noticed from their actions and language, that they really did think they’re better than you since they went to bible college. I discuss this with a couple of non-Christian friends (but familiar with the religion), and they said, this is they’re occupation in a sense, so all this friendliness and such is just a job to them. Like don’t get too emotionally attached, because that’s how they’re gonna see this as. In other words, I can never be a “real” friend, only an experience to them.

  So, I’m like, screw it, this is getting too much and I’m moving on. Left the church and did other things.