Therapy Is For People of Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous Heritage Too
Who do you trust with your mental health?
🌿 You Are Not Alone
If you’re a young adult of Asian, Latinx, or Indigenous heritage navigating anxiety, depression, or trauma in America, know this: your pain is valid, and your healing matters.
Living at the intersection of race, class, culture, and systemic oppression often means carrying invisible burdens. You may feel the weight of expectations, the silence around mental health in your family, or the fear of being misunderstood by professionals who don’t share your lived experience. Trusting someone with your inner world can feel risky when multiple systemic differences loom large.
But healing is possible. Culturally sensitive, justice-informed, trauma therapy offers a powerful space to unpack race-based traumatic stress, reclaim your story, and move toward emotional liberation and beyond into political liberation. Therapy isn’t just for white people—it’s for us, too.
🧠 Why Is It So Hard to Seek Mental Health Help as a Person of Color?
Let’s name the barriers:
Cultural stigma: In many Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous families, mental health struggles are often minimized or misunderstood. Seeking therapy may be seen as weakness, selfishness, or even betrayal of family values.
Colonial trauma: Our communities carry the legacy of colonization, forced migration, forced assimilation, and systemic physical, psychological, social, and spiritual violence. These histories shape how we view vulnerability, authority, and healing. Trust is not easily given. We tend to have a much more difficult time seeking out aid from someone outside our immediate circles.
Religious and achievement-based coping: Many of us were taught to “pray it away” or “work harder” instead of addressing emotional wounds. Faith and ambition are important sources of strength and are part of holistic wellness. Mental health is a category unto itself, mental health care is a modern tool available to us to solve problems, and it serves to complement both the spiritual life and our personal and professional endeavors.
While these barriers are real, they are not insurmountable.
📊 Mental Health Stigma & Barriers
Mental illness stigma is significantly stronger among Black, Latinx, and Asian American adults compared to the general U.S. public. These groups often perceive mental illness as less serious and less treatable, and express greater social distancing from individuals with depression, anxiety, trauma, or psychosis.
Second-generation Asian Americans show higher rates of psychological distress than first-generation immigrants, suggesting that acculturation stress and racialized experiences in the U.S. contribute to mental health challenges.
Within the Asian American community, 33% of Korean American adults report symptoms of depression, while only 16% of Chinese Americans do. Asian Americans tend to underreport their mental health symptoms for many reasons, one reason may be because the words for their feelings and experiences aren’t often known to themselves.
🧠 Race-Based Traumatic Stress & PTSD: What are the statistics?
Between bombings, occupations, resource extraction, labor extraction and slavery, and migration, lifetime exposure to trauma is alarmingly high:
Asian/Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders: 66.4%
Latinx: 68.2%
American Indians/Alaska Natives: 75.2% (men) and 61.4% (women) for physical assault.
PTSD prevalence:
Latinx: 7.0%
Asians: 4.0%
American Indians/Alaska Natives: among the highest rates of suicide and violent crime victimization.
⚠️ The Hidden Costs of Untreated Mental Health in Communities of Color
Untreated mental health issues don’t just affect individuals—they ripple across families, communities, and generations.
📉 Health Risks
People of color are less likely to receive mental health treatment: In 2015, 46% of white adults with mental illness received care, compared to only 30% of Black adults and 27% of Latinx adults.
Untreated mental illness leads to worse outcomes: African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinx individuals with untreated mental illness are more likely to experience poverty, unemployment, incarceration, and poor physical health.
Depression is more persistent and disabling in Black and Latinx communities, even though prevalence rates may be similar to white populations.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, 40.3% of Hispanic adults reported current depression, and 36.9% initiated or increased substance use, compared to 25.3% and 14.3% respectively among white adults.
🧬 Generational Effects
Generational trauma is real: Trauma can be passed down through behaviors, family dynamics, and even biological changes in DNA—a concept supported by epigenetics. Children of untreated trauma survivors often inherit symptoms like anxiety, depression, and emotional dysregulation—even if they didn’t experience the original trauma firsthand.
Studies show that Indigenous historical trauma (IHT) is strongly linked to increased rates of PTSD, substance use, and suicide. These effects persist across generations, contributing to some of the highest mental health disparities in the U.S..
Indigenous youth are 2.5 times more likely to experience serious psychological distress compared to their white peers
A scoping review of 44 studies found that Latinx individuals are particularly vulnerable to generational trauma due to colonial legacies, political violence, and migration-related stressors.
61% of Latinx children report experiencing at least one category of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), compared to 55% of white children.
Asian American families often carry trauma from war, colonization, and forced migration, compounded by the pressure of the “model minority” myth. The internalization of silence, perfectionism, and filial piety contributes to suppressed emotional expression and untreated mental health issues.
Research on Japanese American and Southeast Asian American communities shows that historical trauma leads to increased depression, anxiety, and impaired parenting in subsequent generations.
These statistics aren’t just numbers—they’re a call to action. Therapy isn’t just about feeling better today. It’s about breaking cycles, healing families, and rewriting futures.
How do you want to carry the generation after you?
💬 How to Work Through the Barrier
Therapy becomes transformative when it’s rooted in cultural humility and shared understanding. Working with an Asian therapist near you, a Latinx clinician, or an Indigenous healer can create a space where you don’t have to explain your existence before exploring your emotions.
You deserve a space where you can speak freely about race, culture, and oppression—without censoring yourself or fearing judgment. Many therapists of color, and allies trained in anti-oppressive frameworks, reject Eurocentric models that pathologize our pain. Instead, they honor your resilience and help you reconnect with ancestral wisdom, community care, and embodied healing.
Therapy is not a betrayal of your culture. It’s a reclamation of your right to thrive.
🪶 Why Decolonial, Justice-Informed Therapy Matters
Despite the need, 11.3% of therapists in the US are Asian, Hispanic or Latinx therapists account for 7.9%, and Black therapists make up 4%, underscoring the lack of representation in mental health care.
Decolonial therapy challenges Western norms like individualism and urgency, and instead centers ancestral wisdom, collective healing, and political awareness—especially vital for communities impacted by colonization and systemic oppression.
Decolonial therapy centers your lived experience and challenges the dominant narratives that have harmed our communities. It’s not just about symptom relief—it’s about liberation.
Here’s what it can look like:
For an Indigenous client: Therapy may integrate storytelling, land-based practices, and community rituals to heal intergenerational trauma.
For a Latinx client: A therapist might explore how immigration, colorism, and family dynamics shape identity and mental health.
For an Asian American client: Therapy might address the pressure of model minority myths, systemic contributions to perfectionism, filial piety, and race-based traumatic stress from microaggressions or hate crimes.
Justice-informed therapy doesn’t ask you to “get over it.” It helps you digest it and move through it—with dignity, clarity, and support.
✨ Ready to Begin?
If you’ve been wondering whether therapy could help, this is your sign. You don’t have to wait until you’re in crisis.
Therapy intensives—short-term, focused, half-day or day-long sessions—may be a great fit for your lifestyle if you’re balancing school, work, or caregiving and need deep healing without committing to several months of therapy or longer.
Ongoing hour-long sessions in a weekly or every-other-week format may be more your speed if you want to build slow, gradual, and sustainable change.
Extended therapy sessions that go beyond the hour but are briefer than intensives may help you meet your long-term goals within a shorter timeframe by allowing you to go deeper.
You deserve healing that honors your heritage, your truth, and your future. Schedule a consultation today and take the first step toward reclaiming your mental health.
About the Author
Chelsea Adams, LPC is a licensed therapist with over 7 years of experience supporting clients in Pittsburgh. She specializes in intergenerational, relational, and attachment trauma, religious trauma, and race-based traumatic stress and uses evidence-based approaches like EMDR, Somatic Internal Family Systems, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, and therapy intensives to help clients connect to their own wisdom, voice, and power. Chelsea is committed to providing compassionate, expert care online for clients across Pennsylvania.
