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He was emotionally absent, she said, and it was difficult for her to not have a strong bond with her father. Ly believes his experience at the camp, coupled with the way he was raised by his parents, affected the way he parented her and her two sisters. Long Beach resident Jocelyn Ly, 23, said her grandfather’s experience fighting against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia trickled down to the dynamic she has with her father, who was born in a refugee camp. The trauma refugees experience can be transferred to their children and grandchildren through intergenerational trauma. Amina Sen-Matthews, health program director at the Cambodian Family, said her symptoms point to post-traumatic stress disorder. She was prescribed medication for sleeping and relaxation. She went to a doctor to find out what was wrong, but her diagnosis was unclear. When she arrived in the United States, Eng began noticing that she experienced memory loss and often felt sad. Her life under the regime led her to have nightmares every night, she said. Through an interpreter, Kieng Seng, a health navigator and case manager at the nonprofit, Eng said she remembered being put into a plastic bag and being beaten nearly to death. Phan Eng, 67, a client at Santa Ana-based nonprofit the Cambodian Family, came to the United States in 1985 as a refugee after fleeing the Khmer Rouge regime. “Every night at midnight, I would go to his room and put my ear on his chest just to make sure that he’s still breathing. “I remember hearing my dad screaming every night,” Hoang said. The trauma from that period of time persisted for him and his family even after they settled in the United States. In that time, the passengers were attacked by pirates three times, and they reached the point of hunger where people began talking about killing others for food, he said. He recalled his own experience as a kid of being out at sea on a fishing boat with more than two dozen others for nearly 30 days. Many escaped via boat or foot, experiences that are often a source of trauma for refugees, he said. Hoang was among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled Vietnam after the end of the Vietnam War. Available data on mental health issues facing Vietnamese refugees - much of which is several years to more than a decade old - show that they suffer from issues including PTSD and panic disorder.īut Hoang said there is a lack of services that account for the unique experiences of the community, which affects both community members in need and the limited number of bilingual and bicultural providers that are able to serve them. The experiences of fleeing war-torn nations has had a lasting impact on refugees’ mental health.Ī 2015 study in the journal Psychiatric Services found that 97% of Cambodian respondents met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. en masse after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the 1979 fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, under which more than 2 million people died. Vietnamese and Cambodians began migrating to the U.S. In nearby Long Beach, Cambodians constitute an estimated 20,000 of the city’s population. It’s a similar circumstance faced by the Cambodian community, which in 2010 accounted for about 7,000 of Orange County’s population, according to census figures at the time referenced in a report by nonprofits Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Orange County and Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance. But there’s a strong stigma attached to mental health in the community, and members aren’t always able to access the type of services they need.
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The need for mental health services in the Vietnamese community is high, Hoang said. He also established the group in part to create a space of support for bilingual and bicultural Vietnamese mental health providers. So in 2008, he founded Viet-CARE, a group of mental health professionals working to end the stigma attached to mental health and to address mental health disparities. “It was very scattered and people were working in silos,” Hoang said. He said he arrived surprised to find that neither of those things existed.
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Hoang had hoped to find more groups that served the Vietnamese community and more support for providers in Orange County, given its Vietnamese population of approximately 200,000, according to the 2010 census. It was something he tried to remedy by getting involved in local politics to advocate for more resources. Demand was high because there was a lack of providers serving the Vietnamese community, he said. In the Midwest, he had seen clients who drove up to six hours once a month - even through blizzards - for his services. Paul Hoang moved to Orange County in 2007 after a taxing work year as a mental health clinician in Illinois.