This story includes mentions of suicide that may be triggering for some readers. Visit Mental Health First Aid for a list of resources and organizations. The national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline can be reached at 988 and is available 24/7.
When the Mental Health Initiative for South Asians hosted its first workshop in 2023, over 30 parents gathered at Radha Madhav Dham, a Hindu temple in Austin. It was the first time some attendees shared their families’ experiences with South Asian American community members. Guided by student facilitators, they learned how to start talking about mental health with their children.
After the workshop, a group of parents approached the students to express their gratitude.
“They were like, ‘You have to do this,’” Ravi Parekh, the nonprofit organization’s co-founder, told The Barbed Wire. “‘You have to come here and continue doing this.’”
Moments like this encourage Parekh and co-founder Aaron Pandian to continue their work with the Mental Health Initiative for South Asians, which aims to destigmatize mental health and reduce barriers to accessing care in the South Asian American community through culturally relevant resources and research. The initiative began as a student organization at the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 after the co-founders’ close friend and roommate Farhan Towhid took his life and the lives of his family in a murder-suicide during their freshman year.
When Pandian and Parekh read through Towhid’s journal during the week of his funeral in April 2021, they learned that his parents didn’t know how to best support him through his mental health struggles. Parekh said this matched a larger gap they saw while working to establish the student organization. Growing up, Parekh noticed that his South Asian American community emphasized saving face and often placed high expectations on the younger generation to succeed.
“The ‘What will they say?’ phrase is very prevalent in our community,” Parekh said. “I think anything that reflects a failure when it comes to the parenting side of things, or the youth side of things, is shamed and stigmatized.”
Since its founding, the Mental Health Initiative for South Asians has reached more than 1,000 parents through mental health workshops held in places of worship — and is now preparing to expand beyond Texas. On May 7, the initiative launched its Heal Forward campaign to inspire families to have regular, open conversations about mental health. Parekh said students from Arizona State University, New York University, and Stanford University — in addition to those from Texas schools — have reached out and expressed interest in starting their own organization chapters on their campuses.
Nearly 50% of South Asian American youth experience moderate to severe depressive symptoms, according to a 2024 report from The Asian American Foundation. Overall, Asian Americans are the least likely to seek out mental health services compared to any other racial or ethnic group, according to the American Psychiatric Association. Suicide was also the leading cause of death for Asian Americans ages 15 to 24 in 2022, per the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In Pandian’s household, mental health was viewed as a “very Western ideal,” so it hardly came up in exchanges with his family, he told The Barbed Wire. Researchers have noted that many South Asian languages don’t have terms that define mental disorders like depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Instead, words such as “tension” and “pagal” — which means “crazy” in Hindi and Urdu — are used, attaching a negative connotation to the issue. South Asians also commonly experience psychological distress through physical symptoms, which leads to mental health problems going undiagnosed or untreated, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
Many older South Asian Americans prioritized survival upon immigrating to the U.S., which left little space for them to process their emotions, said Sambavi Venkatesan, a licensed professional therapist in Austin. She also pointed to the diversity of the South Asian American population, which practices various religions and speaks hundreds of languages.
“Even within the umbrella of South Asian, there’s so many different countries — and then even within those countries, there’s so many different subcultures,” Venkatesan told The Barbed Wire. “I think all of those elements definitely shift the experience of that individual person, and that often tends to get missed. ‘Asian American’ tends to become this monolith, at least here in the United States.”
The Heal Forward campaign includes a free family card game, conversation guide, and magazine to encourage accessible dialogue about intergenerational healing and wellness in South Asian American households. Parekh said his organization worked with clinicians to build a curriculum for parents, from walking them through the importance of mental health to navigating the mental health care system.
“The card game was actually my mom’s idea,” Parekh said. “So because it was coming from a South Asian parent themselves, and our campaign is targeted to parents, it made a lot of sense for us to execute that idea… We want parents to have something that they can use, reflect on, and then share their experiences with.”
The 110 cards in the physical version of the game are divided into three levels of depth to gradually ease families into discussion. Each card has a prompt, asking questions such as, “What has been my happiest memory from this past year?” and “What do I need to hear from my family to feel comfortable sharing my difficult emotions?”
For both Parekh and Pandian, it was important to make the campaign resources easy to understand.
“It definitely allows families to start again, normalizing those concepts and understanding what it means to talk about mental health in a very approachable way,” Pandian said.
When the Mental Health Initiative for South Asians started, Pandian said he was told that changing the way mental health is seen in their community, where it’s so heavily stigmatized, would be challenging. “This is going to take decades of intervention,” Pandian remembered them saying. “This is such a big goal.” Still, Pandian and his team stayed committed to conducting outreach and securing partnerships with other organizations. Now, the organization’s national Instagram account has surpassed 450,000 views on its reels since launching in April.
“We have no intention of doing anything half-baked,” Pandian said. “Everything has intention. Everything has a purpose. Everything is done carefully and thoughtfully, and we plan to see everything through.”
Parekh’s experiences were different from both of his roommates. He grew up in a household that nurtured his mental well-being. Early on, his mother enrolled him in therapy, and made it known that he could talk to her about his struggles. Parekh said seeing other South Asian parents embrace that same openness through his work fulfills him — and is more than enough to keep him going.
“The change in these communities is visible, and you see a paradigm shift where even one workshop opens up conversation 1%,” Parekh said. “Even if it’s 1%, 1% is infinitely greater than zero.”
