Group Offers Help for Depressed Hmong Women
By Associated Press

Paoze Thao of St. Paul, Minnesota was once so depressed that she forgot how to walk. She had no energy or appetite. Her face was frozen in sadness as she grieved her separation from her husband, whom she had to leave behind in Laos when she escaped years ago.

But since she started coming to the Hmong Women’s Depression Support Group each week, she has improved.

“This program taught me to learn how to talk and share my emotions,” Thao, 43, said through an interpreter. “I know how to go out and come back by myself. I know how to eat again. I know how to taste food again.”

Clinical depression like Thao’s is one of the country’s most common mental illnesses, affecting more than 19 million Americans of all ages, races and ethnic groups annually, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

For Hmong women, getting help is a particular challenge since the Hmong culture doesn’t often include mental health concepts like clinical depression.

“I think now people are starting to pick it up, [but] very slowly,” said Ly Vang, executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Hmong Women in Minnesota.

Traditional Hmong religious beliefs attribute the cause of illnesses to the spirits that inhabit people and nature.

Vang said getting Hmong women to recognize depression is difficult. But some are making progress with the help of programs like the support group run for the past five years by the Wilder Social Adjustment Program for Southeast Asians.

One of the group’s tangible achievements is an 8-foot by 8-foot quilt with individual patches sewn by group members, each showing what they consider the most important aspect of their past.

The quilt vibrates with warm, cheery colors. Some patches depict scenes that are meticulously hand-stitched.

In one, a Vietnam War airplane strafes a thatched hut village in Laos with bright magenta machine gun fire. In another, festive green-, black- and pink-vested Hmong flee rifle-carrying communist soldiers through mountain fields of tiny hot pink flowers. In yet another, Hmong clutch sharp green reeds in each hand to help them float across the Mekong River to safety in Thailand.

Therapists in the program suggested the quilt idea three years ago because they couldn’t get anyone to talk.

“I was like a baby,” Phoua Thao said, recalling the depths of her depression. “I didn’t know how to eat and drink and walk.

“The program was very helpful to us to grow spiritually and emotionally,” said the 38-year-old single mother of five whose husband was killed in Laos before he could escape.

Some dream of taking a trip back to Laos to revisit the places where family members were killed. Fleeing their enemies, they never got a chance to give their relatives a proper farewell.

They can’t afford the trip, but that doesn’t stop some from dreaming.

“During the day they are here,” said Emily Hollidge, clinical supervisor for another mental health program at Lao Family Community Inc. “But at night, they are not—they are back in Laos with their families.”