May is National Mental Health Awareness Month, so we’re featuring stories that help us broach difficult issues with our loved ones. In this episode, Sunny’s family never acknowledged his mom’s depression or suicide attempts, and he had to learn how to face his own mental health struggles. And mental health advocate Carmen Cusido corrects misconceptions about overcoming a mental illness, and offers advice for moving through difficult emotions during a crisis.
Sunny Chang and his two sisters are creators and hosts of The Three Siblings Podcast, where they share their personal mental health journey after surviving the loss of their parents and offer hope and encouragement to people dealing with grief.
Featured Expert: Carmen Cusido is a longtime mental health advocate. She has written and spoken extensively about her struggle with depression and her recovery from anorexia. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Oprah Daily, Refinery29, Health, NBC, CNN, NPR, Next Avenue, Cosmopolitan, and other publications. Cusido has also spoken about grief and loss for publications like AARP Magazine en español and TV stations like Univision 41 and PBS/NJTV. She earned a bachelor’s from Rutgers University and a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. She also has taken courses at Harvard Business School and the Yale Writers Workshop. She lives in Northern New Jersey.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers free and confidential support 24/7. Their number is 800 273 8255. You can also text, "Hello," to 741741. The help is free, confidential, and available 24/7.
If you loved this episode, listen to When a Sister Commits Suicide, Part 1 and Part 2, and Needing a Self-Care Trip, but Parents Want Her Home.
We’d love to hear your stories of triumph and frustration so send us a detailed voice memo to hello@talktomamipapi.com. You might be on a future episode! Let’s connect on Twitter and Instagram at @TalkToMamiPapi and email us at hello@talktomamipapi.com. And follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi everybody. As you may know, May is National Mental Health Awareness Month. So for the next few episodes, we're focusing on how to have productive conversations around mental health with our families. On today's episode, we talk about difficult topics, including suicide. So please, please use your discretion as you listen, and most of all, take care of yourself. Stop listening if you want to. Get someone to listen with you or don't listen at all.
Today, we welcome Sunny. Sunny lost his mother when he was in college. She died of suicide, but his family never talked about her depression or her mental health. So in the aftermath of this unbelievable loss, Sunny also had to figure out how to face his grief and his own mental health struggles. Let's get into it.
Sunny: My name is Sunny. I'm the host and creator of the Three Siblings Podcast, which as the title says, is my two sisters and me. My parents lived the American Dream. They came from China. I was born and raised in Texas, and I currently work at Google doing sales, and I've been in Texas my whole life. Growing up, I called my parents Mama and Baba when I spoke to them in Chinese.
It was very traumatic how we lost my parents. When I was 14, I found out that my dad was cheating on my mom. The divorce was super messy and because of it, my mom started suffering from clinical depression, and over the next six years, she attempted suicide three times. My dad, he had a heart attack, was in a coma for two weeks. He eventually passed away. Six months later, my mom got smarter. She completed suicide. She jumped off the ninth floor of a parking garage.
Growing up, mental health, depression was never really spoken about in my family, between my parents and me, between my sisters and me. I think that was also a huge contributor to my mom's eventual passing. Her friends and and my dad being from China, it was all about doing the best you can, trying to succeed in the US when most oftentimes those people came from very little. And mental health, it's getting better about it, but it still seems like a weakness, which is why a lot of people don't want to talk about it, especially when these communities, everyone is trying to succeed and if they have this weakness, they are inferior to others.
It was really hard to make sense of my mom's depression and her attempts. I didn't really understand what it was. There was a lot of regret and guilt. It was, "What did I do wrong? What could I have done better?" Right now, I'm trying to reframe that and be more forgiving of myself because I did what I was capable of. I remember when my mom attempted for the second time and she was in the hospital. My dad told me, "Focus on school, focus on college. Focus on getting an internship, getting a job. We will be there for your mom." And so from that, it was instilled in me to distract myself really.
And after both my parents passed away, that was just my means of survival. I focused on doing well in school and because of that, I bottled in my emotions. It was always a facade. I related to social media where when you're posting on Instagram, you're posting your happiest pictures, you're smiling, and that was the image I tried to carry on for people. I didn't want to appear weak. That led to a point where my depression was so bad, I just couldn't function anymore. My friend had told me she had a psychiatrist, and I thought maybe talking to him could help out. I met with him, I started taking medicine, and through him I found my first therapist, and that was very pivotal to my life.
Sunny: I was very uncomfortable with talking to other people about my depression and anxiety at that time. Being vulnerable was not natural to me. Back then, my friends didn't really fully comprehend mental health yet either. As we've grown up, my friends and the people I'm around now are definitely more understanding and more accepting of it and more open to it. But also, I think that fake image was a way of faking myself out and not trying to feel that grief and trauma that was deep down buried inside me because I was scared of it. I didn't want to acknowledge it. It slowly becomes easier.
I continue to try to be more vulnerable with my friends and try to have deeper conversations with people as well. I think people appreciate those more genuine conversations where you talk about not being okay and needing help. It's like lifting weights. The more you do it, the easier it gets. And one of the most important conversations I've had in my life is one of my mentors at work, I told them the story of what happened with my parents and he got really teared up and he told me that he attempted suicide and he survived, and he said, "The one thing I wanted my kids to know is that there was nothing that they could do." Hearing him say that, "There's nothing my kids could have done differently," it touched my heart knowing and hearing that the things my mom was going through, she was going through something that needed a lot of medical help, that needed something that I wasn't able to provide for because I was 19 when she passed away, I did what I could. And so having that conversation with him, hearing that was one of the most important things I've ever heard.
Lantigua: I was really moved by Sunny's experience, and especially by how calmly and non-judgmentally he's able to reflect on all of it. Suicide is one of the hardest things we talk about on this show, and it's hard to talk about it in any context, but especially so when mental health is a topic so many of our families simply avoid. How can we as first gens break the cycle of silence and stigma? How can we begin to open up about our pain and our emotional struggles to our families, but also to ourselves? And why is doing so often perceived as, "weakness”? To help us figure all of this out, I did what I always do, called in an expert.
Carmen Cusido:
My name is Carmen Cusido. I am a mental health advocate and a writer based in Northern New Jersey. I also am a suicide attempt survivor as well.
Lantigua: Thank you for sharing that. I am so deeply honored that you're here. So I'm going to start with the same question I always ask, which is, as you listened, what did you hear?
Cusido: Well, first of all, I heard a very brave young man. By Sunny sharing his story, I think he really is helping a lot of other people and helps demystify and destigmatize mental health issues and suicidality and depression.
Lantigua: I was so impressed by his composure and I was so impressed by his self-awareness. These are wounds that he's carrying around. So tell me a little bit about what was familiar maybe and what was new to you in his story and in the work that you do around suicide prevention and healing?
Cusido: So what was very familiar is that sense of, "Did I ask enough? Did I do enough? What did I miss?" Also, very familiar, the feeling of being alone, right? Because these are illnesses that people don't like to talk about. People also don't really like to talk about grief, and it's something that unfortunately in our society, it's that one-two punch of both mental health issues and grief and death, that we as a society are very uncomfortable discussing openly.
Lantigua: So I actually was going to ask you about that because he makes it very clear that there's, for him a connection between his mental health and basically a cultural bias against openly talking about it. Can you give us a sense of how influential that taboo on mental health is for some of us?
Cusido: Yeah. What I've noticed is in all kinds of immigrant cultures, it's almost like if you say that you're sick, and this is an illness just like any other illness, it's almost like, "Okay, but what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you?" There's something, ‘defective.’ And that's a theme. I've seen it in people who come from other immigrant cultures, that sense of you're here to do good, so to speak, to make your families proud, especially if you're first generation here, if you were born here. And it feels like this is almost like a setback, almost like getting a bad grade on a test. Like, "Oh, why are you ‘failing' at this? We've given you everything. Why are you failing at this?" And not recognizing, some people do not recognize that you don't say to somebody with asthma or with diabetes, "Oh, why is your blood sugar so low? Why are you failing at that?" Because it's your body, it's body chemistry. Same thing with your brain.
Lantigua: In some instances, depressive episodes, anxiety, PTSD, these are things that build up over years. What is your advice? What is your guidance on identifying earlier signs before they begin to compound on one another? How do we know that we're at the point where we have to have help?
Cusido: Well, each of us knows ourselves best, and so I think that if you start noticing if you're a very social person and suddenly you don't really feel like going out really at all, if you typically do very well at work and now you're making careless mistakes or call out sick more than often, any kind of changes, whether it's weight gain, weight loss. For the most part, we typically are who we are. And then if something drastic happens, you do notice it. If your hygiene has fallen off, if you're not sleeping well enough or eating well enough, if somebody's usually very calm and now they're angry all the time, there are signs like that to watch out for.
Lantigua: And then obviously, if you're having suicidal ideation or making actual plans, that seems to be the extreme red flag for anyone.
Cusido: Right.
Lantigua: So I want to go back to an anecdote that Sunny shared, which was that at one point when his mother was in a hospital recovering from a suicide attempt, his father simply said to him, "Focus on your schoolwork. We're going to get your mom the help she needs, but focus on your schoolwork." And that seemed so cruel to me in today's context as a mom to say to someone whose mother is in the hospital, "Focus on your schoolwork," and it belies this strength that we're supposed to have.
So how can other adults around a vulnerable young person like this who's going through something so traumatic, how can other adults come in and encircle them? What are some of the techniques that we can utilize without imposing or without being unwelcomed? What would work?
Cusido: I think sometimes people feel overwhelmed because they don't know how to help you and they feel like they need to give you concrete, "You have to do this on Wednesday and then do this on Friday." The thing that we don't... And in fact, I have the book right here, which is an incredible book, The Body Keeps the Score, which is trauma doesn't only reside in our brains, it resides in our bodies. And we tend to think, "Oh, if we try to avoid feeling this sadness or thinking about this awful traumatic event, that we’ll 'get over it.'" And in fact, the opposite is true. Sometimes you actually have to... In a safe setting in a therapy session, you have to relive the traumatic moment so that that trauma that's stuck in your body can get released.
And I think sometimes even if you're not with a therapist, if it's just with a friend or somebody else, let the person talk it out. Sometimes just by talking it out and feeling those overwhelming feelings, it starts to calm down. It's almost like I would... Like the worst part of a storm where you think, "Oh my God, this rain and this wind isn't going to stop." And that's the worst part of it. And then you sit through it and it's uncomfortable, but eventually the clouds break and the rain stops, and then that's where you want to get through, if that makes sense.
Lantigua: That's a beautiful analogy actually, because part of it is not just the survival part, but the looking forward to what's going to be on the other side of that. So I want to ask you about-
Cusido: Can I just—Sorry to interrupt, but can I just say one thing about the homework thing?
Lantigua: Please.
Cusido: I see how it comes across as cruel, but I'm going to spin it a little bit this way. Sometimes when you're going through the worst of the worst, distractions help. One of the things that does help that you can do, something that helped a lot when I would visit my mom in the hospital, it was overwhelming. And so then I would either take a walk or read a book or do some work or bring my work computer to the hospital so that I can learn how to deal with that pain in increments, so that it wasn't all consuming.
Lantigua: Okay. So no, that makes a lot of sense to me. That absolutely makes a lot of sense because if you're in the hospital, there's literally nothing you can do. So maybe that was a way to give him something to distract him and refocus his energy. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about this thing that has permeated all aspects of society, which is vulnerability, because I think in the context of multi-generation immigrant families, first there's no such thing, and second, it can really be seen as weakness. The first, second, third gen Americans are not coming up thinking that it is a weakness.
How do we, or should we even try to translate culturally that value that we're learning as hyphenated Americans to our parents? Is it worth it or is this one of those things where you're like, "It is what it is, that's who they are”?
Cusido: I really think it depends on how receptive the person is. Some people may not understand it, but they're open to understanding and open to hearing you. And I think in those cases, go for it. But sometimes they really don't know how. We each carry trauma. We each carry insecurities. We're all complex human beings. So if somebody can't quite understand you, can't quite be there for you, maybe understand that they didn't get the kind of support that you're now asking from them, and it's unfortunate, but that's a lesson for you too. Sometimes you have to just go with grace.
Lantigua: Go with grace. I like that, because you're right, you're not wishing them ill. You are not upset at them. You're simply releasing them. Carmen, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Cusido: Thank you.
Lantigua: All right. Here's what Carmen taught us today.
Recognize it's an illness. Overcoming severe mental challenges like depression is not about personally failing or succeeding at anything. It's not about being strong enough or too weak either. It's about body chemistry. So a trained professional must help.
Ride out the storm. Allow yourself to feel and express your emotions with a therapist or in another safe setting. Doing so can help you move through turbulent times and help get you to the other side.
And remember, press pause. If you feel overwhelmed with pain, grief, or other negative feelings, it's okay to take a break. Shift your attention from a difficult situation, go for a walk, share a meal with a friend, or find refuge in an activity that you love. Then bring your attention back when you are ready.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers free and confidential support 24/7. Their number is 800 273 8255. That's 800 273 8255. You can also text, "Hello," to 741741. Again, just simply text, "Hello," to 741741. The help is free, confidential, and available 24/7. Thank you for listening and for sharing us.
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] about Anything is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is the show's producer. Tren Lightburn mixed this episode. I'm the creator and host, Juleyka Lantigua. On Twitter and Instagram, we're @talktomamipapi. Bye everybody. Talk to you soon.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “Shedding Inherited Stigmas about Mental Illness”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] about Anything,
LWC Studios., May 8, 2023. TalkToMamiPapi.com.