Our Mental Health and Community-Centered Practices of Care: A Conversation

RSVP HERE

In the past year and a half, we have navigated a devastating pandemic that has compounded existing vulnerabilities, including exhausting challenges to sustaining our mental, physical, and emotional health. Yet, even as Black, Indigenous, and POC communities, including Asian American and immigrant peoples, are disproportionately impacted by socio-economic precarity, state carelessness, and carceral violence, these very communities must navigate excruciating barriers to accessing resources necessary for safety, health, and wellbeing.

Please join GYOPO and Stop DiscriminAsian for an online roundtable discussion with Gonji Lee (they/them), Hieu Nguyen (him/him), and Mimi Khúc as they dive into the complex meanings of mental health and community care during this time of prolonged crisis. As mental health practitioners who center Asian American, immigrant, refugee, and QTIPOC+ peoples in their work, panelists will discuss the challenges faced by these communities. Panelists will also explore what it means to shift our focus from individual diagnosis to enactments of community and collective care and share how they have cared for their own wellbeing to sustain their liberatory work with communities.

This program is dedicated to our health practitioners and caregivers who juggle an overwhelming array of responsibilities on a daily basis with sobering costs and consequences.

Gonji Lee

(they/them) is a queer Corean child of immigrant parents. They believe that everyone deserves to have a therapist who is able to hold people in all of their nuanced complexities. Gonji is passionate about disrupting white, cis-centric, and heteronormative notions of healing, and believe that there must be concurrent individual (psychotherapy), community (interdependent care systems and advocacy), and systemic (movement organizing) change in order to set up the conditions for our communities to thrive. They have the privilege of partnering with people on their journeys to nourish and flourish even while living under multiple systems of oppression.

Mimi Khúc

(she/her) is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell and Scholar/Artist/Activist in Residence in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. She is the managing editor of The Asian American Literary Review and guest editor of Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health. She is very slowly working on several book projects, including a manifesto on contingency in Asian American studies and essays on mental health, the arts, and the university. But mostly she spends her time baking, as access and care for herself and loved ones.

Hieu Nguyen

(he/him) LCSW, MBA, currently serves as Orange County Health Care Agency’s first Director of the Office of Population & Health Equity. Nguyen previously served as the Director for System of Care at Mind OC, served as the Director of Clinical Services and Operations at Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team. Nguyen advocates for medically marginalized communities and his work aims to address health disparities and advance health equity. Hieu also serves as a community organizer and co-founded and served as executive board chair for Viet Rainbow of Orange County (VROC), the only 501(c)3 Vietnamese American LGBTQ organization in the United States.