Suicide rates among young Asian Americans have sharply increased over the last few years — and a few subgroups seem to be particularly vulnerable.
A new study points out that although suicide rates for Asian men have increased 72% and for women 125% over the past 25 years, certain Asian American minorities and Pacific Islander groups fare even worse. Vietnamese American youth, for example, face a particularly high risk.
On the surface, Asian American suicide rates might appear to be low in comparison to other groups, said study author Anthony Bui, who is a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Lumping all Asian American groups together doesn’t paint the whole picture.
Bui examined the suicide rates of Asian American youth (aged 15-19) and young adults (aged 20-24) between 2018 and 2022.
His report, released earlier this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics, reveals that Vietnamese American youth have disproportionately high rates of death by suicide — at 10.57 per 100,000. Indian American youth, on the other hand, have the lowest in the study rates, with 6.91 deaths per 100,000.
Lack of in-language resources and shame around mental health conversations in certain communities can present barriers to accessing care, he said.
“Southeast Asian communities have a lot of history with migration and trauma over the last five decades,” Bui said. “I’m Vietnamese and some of the words for mental health in Vietnamese are highly, highly stigmatized.”
Smaller minority populations, including Pakistani, Cambodian, Japanese and Thai Americans — among others — together have a youth suicide rate of 13.37 — the highest in the report.
The uptick in Asian American youth suicides isn’t isolated; the general U.S. population has also seen a marked increase over the last two decades. But the community faces a unique set of contributing factors that might be responsible for the sharper rise in the last few years, Bui said.
“Especially over the last decade, there’s been so much more xenophobia and anti-Asian hate that a lot of these communities have experienced,” he said. “Having this increased societal pressure to succeed is also really damaging to the mental health of these youth and can contribute to worse depression and more suicidality.”
Racism during Covid also sparked some Asian American families to purchase guns for the first time, something that Bui says may be a contributing factor.
“I think some of these families might feel more safe having a firearm,” he said. “But the dangerous thing about bringing a firearm in the home is that that it does increase your risk of suicide and homicidal behavior.”
While more research needs to be done to explain the stark disparities among various Asian communities, language specific and culturally competent mental health resources are an urgent need across the board, he said.
“We have a youth mental health crisis that’s going on right now,” Bui said. “We need to really prioritize some of these high risk groups… and really take into account people’s culture, language and family into treatment for mental health.”
