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An overview of the history of Asian American psychology is provided by reviewing the context for the development of the field as well as the early founding of the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA). The presidents of AAPA as well as key events and conferences are noted. The involvement of AAPA leaders in national mental health policies and activities are reviewed. The substantive areas of Asian American psychology and the education and training of Asian American psychologists are also discussed. The article ends with some comments about the future of Asian American psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)

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Contents

Abstract

Brief Immigration History and Major Population Trends

Immigration History

Population Trends

Asian American Studies

History of Asian American Psychology

Founding of the Asian American Psychological Association

Key Events and Conferences

Sue’s Testimony to Washington State Senate

Establishment of Parallel Services

Contributions of Asian American Women Psychologists

National Mental Health Policies and Activities

Substantive Areas of Asian American Psychological Research

Education and Training

Future of Asian American Psychology

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Figures and Tables

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Table 1

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Abstract

The present article seeks to provide an overview of the history of Asian American Psychology. [ 1 ] There is only one other existing document to our knowledge that has chronicled the history of Asian American Psychology (Leong, 1995), which recorded the history and accomplishments of the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA) to that date. Much has happened in the field of Asian American psychology since then. The current article summarizes the major events in Asian American psychology from 1972 to 2008, which includes but also goes beyond the achievements of the AAPA. In providing this historical overview, this article also relies on significant portions of the report written by Leong (1995), which was an in-house association monograph that was not widely circulated.

We begin by setting a historical context for Asian American psychology. We provide a brief overview of the Asian American population demographics and major trends in immigration as well as a note on the history and development of Asian American studies as a scholarly discipline. We then chronicle the founding and the development of the Asian American Psychological Association, the primary professional organization for Asian American psychologists. Next, we review the substantive areas of research in Asian American psychology and the major developments in practice and public policy concerning the mental health of Asian American populations. We end with an overview of the developments in the education and training of professionals in Asian American psychology, with a look toward the future of the field.

Brief Immigration History and Major Population Trends

In the 2000 U.S. census, there were 11.9 million U.S. residents who reported their “race” as full or part Asian (or 4.2% of the U.S. population). The Asian American population has seen a rapid increase in the past few decades. Whereas Asian Americans accounted for only one half of 1% of the total U.S. population in 1960 (Takaki, 1989), the number of U.S. residents of Asian ancestry in 2005 was estimated to be 13.5 million or 5% of the total U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005). Of these, 8.7 million (or 64%) were born in Asia; thus the population largely comprises immigrant individuals and families.

Immigration History

As with other immigrant populations, Asian American population patterns are dynamic and subject to U.S. immigration policy. Historically, the U.S. immigration policy has determined the size of the Asian American population as well as its ethnic composition, socioeconomic welfare, and the rights and privileges accorded to this group. For psychology, an understanding of the history of immigration legislation—particularly as it targeted various Asian groups for exclusion and discrimination on the basis of race—provides a critical context in which we strive to understand the contemporary experiences of Asian American individuals and communities. For this reason, we give an abbreviated history of immigration and population pattern shifts of Asians in the United States. Those interested in more detailed accounts of Asian American history are referred to Chan (1991) and Takaki (1989).

Starting in the 1830s, the Chinese began to arrive in large numbers as contract laborers in Hawaii’s sugar plantations, followed by the Japanese laborers in the 1880s, and Korean and Filipino laborers at the turn of the century. With the annexation of California in 1848 and the westward expansion of the railroads, coupled with the gold rush, the Chinese laborers as well as merchants migrated to the U.S. mainland starting in the 1840s. By 1880, there were an estimated 124,000 Chinese who had immigrated to the mainland United States. By then, the Chinese were the largest racial minority in the west and viewed hostilely by others as unwelcome economic competitors. As early as 1854, Chinese in America were met with legal discrimination, as in the California Supreme Court ruling on People v. Hall, denying Chinese the right to testify in courts. There were a series of other legal decisions in California that denied Chinese various rights and protections, culminating in the 1882 federal legislation Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years and declared them ineligible for citizenship.

Such treatment of the Chinese by the host American society, with an eager recruitment of laborers by large businesses followed by societal and legal discrimination and eventual exclusion, was also seen for the Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Indian migrants that followed the Chinese exclusion. The anti-Asian sentiments that continued to face the various Asian immigrant groups were paralleled by various legislations, protocols, and judicial rulings that barred immigration and greatly limited the rights of Asians already in the United States. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 suspended immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. This act was renewed in 1892 and in 1902 and made permanent in 1904. The 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement between Japan and the United States established a diplomatic protocol in which Japan agreed to stop issuing passports to Japanese laborers. California’s 1913 Alien Land Law prohibited sales of agricultural lands to “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” and this in effect barred Japanese and other immigrants from owning land. The 1917 Immigration Act established an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that included India, so as to prevent further Indian immigration. The 1922 Supreme Court ruling on Ozawa v. United States and 1923 ruling on United States v. Thind denied requests for naturalization by a Japanese immigrant and an Indian immigrant, respectively, because they were not “White.” The 1924 Immigration Act excluded all immigration of aliens ineligible for citizenship, which affected virtually all Asian immigrants except for those from the Phillippines (who at the time were not officially aliens because the Philippines was a U.S. territory at the time.)The 1936 Tydings-McDuffe Act established the creation of a Philippine commonwealth, thus ending the Filipinos’ status as U.S. nationals, and set the annual Filipino immigration quota at 50. Thus in this manner, the doors of immigration were closed for each of the major Asian groups in the first part of the 20th century.

It was not until World War II—during which those of Japanese ancestry, regardless of their citizenship status, were interned in camps—that some of the exclusionary immigration and naturalization laws began to be repealed. Chinese exclusion law and restriction to naturalization were repealed in 1943, Indian and Filipino immigrants’ right to naturalize was granted in 1946, and all racial prerequisites for naturalization were eliminated in 1952. However, it was not until after 1965, with the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1965—which replaced restrictive per-country quotas for immigration with liberal hemispheric quotas, placed a priority for high-skill workers (e.g., engineers, scientists, and medical workers), and gave preferences to family reunifications—that the Asian American population began the fast pace of growth that continues to this day. Finally, in the 1970s after the Vietnam conflict and the fall of Saigon, the United States began admitting large numbers of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Population Trends

Since the early days of Asian immigration, the Asian American population has been concentrated on the West Coast and in Hawaii. In the 1960 census, when Asian Americans composed 0.5% of the total U.S. population, 71% of them were living in California or Hawaii. By the 1980 census, when Asian Americans composed 1.4% of the U.S. population, only 57% were living in the West. The federal government’s refugee resettlement policies, in which Southeast Asian refugees were resettled across the country, helped to increase the dispersion of the Asian American population. In 2000, 48% of Asians still lived in the West, although the South experienced the greatest rate of increase in Asian American population.

Along with the geographic diversification of Asian Americans over the last half century, the ethnic composition of Asian Americans also saw dramatic shifts. Whereas Japanese Americans composed the largest group in 1960, accounting for 50% of Asian Americans then, Japanese were only 8% of Asian Americans by 2000. Chinese, Filipino, and Asian Indians were the largest groups of Asian Americans in 2000, followed by Vietnamese and Korean Americans.

The dominant image of Asian Americans as a model minority group with high economic and educational attainments and low rates of social problems has been sustained and perpetuated by both the mainstream media and members of Asian American communities. The model minority thesis first emerged in the mid-1960s with the popular media’s attention to the high educational achievement of Asian Americans. Sociologist William Petersen’s (1966) article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled “Success Story, Japanese American Style,” was the first to cast Asian Americans as a model minority, and this piece was followed by a succession of media coverage that similarly lauded the image of Asian Americans as a hardworking, noncomplaining minority group in contrast to other minority groups. [ 2 ] Coming at the height of the civil rights movement in the nation, Asian American social activists and scholars argued that Asian Americans were being touted as the model minority to discredit and discourage the protests and demands for social justice of African Americans and Latinos at the time (Suzuki, 2002).

In addition to questioning the ideological motivations behind the perpetuation of the model minority thesis, scholars have also questioned the empirical bases of this image. When aggregated across various ethnic groups, demographic profiles appear to support the notion of Asian Americans as a high-achieving group. For example, the 2000 census showed that Asian Americans have the highest median family income of all races (at $59,324 in comparison with the national average of $50,046) and were more likely than other racial groups to have obtained a bachelor’s, master’s, professional, or doctoral degree (e.g., 44.1% of Asian Americans had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree in comparison with 28.1% of Whites). However, the Asian American population also tends to show a wide range on many of these structural variables. For example, even though the median family income of Asian Americans is higher than the national average, the poverty rate of 10.8% was higher than that of non-Hispanic Whites (at 7.5%) in 2000. Strikingly, noncitizen immigrant Asian Americans had a poverty rate of 19.4%. Low wage and contract labor (e.g., in the garment industry, janitorial services, and food service industry) are common among many newly arrived Asian American immigrants with limited English fluency. And while Asian American households may have a higher median family income than the national average, they also tend to live in geographical areas with high real estate prices (such as Hawaii, California, and New York) and have more family members contributing to the family income.

There is also a wide range in the educational attainment among various Asian American groups. For example, the 1990 census showed that while there was high rate of college enrollment among 18- to 24-year-olds among Chinese (66.5%), Japanese (63.5%), Asian Indian (61.9%), and Korean (60.3%) young adults, other groups such as Hmong (31.7%) and Laotians (26.3%) showed a lower rate than the national average rate of 34.4% for college enrollment. Moreover, Pang, Kiang, and Pak (2004) argued that Asian Americans’ performance on high-stakes tests is often misunderstood. The failure rate on the state exam for Asian American 10th-graders in Massachusetts was 26% on English and 40% on math—and even higher in school districts with high enrollment of Cambodian and Vietnamese American students. In short, the aggregate statistics that support the model minority image of Asian Americans betray the wide variability within this population group. However, despite an extensive literature contesting its ideological and factual bases, the model minority thesis continues to be a salient theme in both academic discourse and community narratives. Prashad (2006) argued that the model minority thesis continues to hold sway because the idea appeals to the upwardly mobile segment of the Asian American community and with scholars whose work on Asian Americans is premised on the upwardly mobile class vision of a segment of Asian Americans.

Asian American Studies

The field of Asian American studies traces its origin in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a part of a larger social and political movement to challenge the marginalization of Asians in the United States and around the world. According to Omatsu (1994), the Asian American movement began in parallel not with the initial campaign for civil rights but with the later demand for Black liberation, in the tradition of militant activism led by Malcolm X. In this vein, Asian American studies arose out of activism in academia in concert with the Third World student movements on the campuses of the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University and partly in reaction to the racism displayed during American wars in Southeast Asia. Prashad (2005) writes that ethnic studies—including Asian American studies—emerged out of an antiracist, social justice tradition to legitimize the scholarship of individuals and communities of color who had been marginalized in academia. As such, ethnic studies recognized that this new field of study needed the participation of the “community” in research as an active participant rather than simply as objects of study and that an Asian American scholar aspires to conduct action-oriented research that would influence the lives of Asian Americans.

Although phrases such as militant activism and third world struggle may not appear to describe the aims of contemporary Asian American psychology today, it is important to note that Asian American psychology also came into being during that era of the Asian American movement and that the early thinkers were greatly influenced by the tenor of the times. Indeed, one of the earliest articles to be published in Asian American psychology by S. Sue and D. W. Sue (1971), entitled “Chinese American Personality and Mental Health,” did not appear in a psychology journal but instead in the first year of the publication of the Amerasia journal, the first Asian American Studies journal.

History of Asian American Psychology

Although there had been some limited psychological research with Asian Americans prior to the late 1960s, the field of Asian American psychology emerged in the era of the Civil Rights movement alongside the start of Asian American studies. Table 1 shows the key events in Asian American psychology, embedded in the timeline of events of significance in Asian American history.

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Key Events in the History of Asian American Psychology (Years in Boldface), With References to Events in Asian American History

Founding of the Asian American Psychological Association

The Asian American Psychological Association was founded on December 10, 1972, by a group of Asian American psychologists and other mental health professionals in the San Francisco Bay area. This group included Derald Sue, Stanley Sue, Roger Lum, Marion Tin-Loy, and Tina Tong Yee, who met informally with each other to exchange ideas and provide social support to each other. With the leadership of Derald Sue, who became the first president of the association, and a core group of active members, the AAPA continued to grow over the years. From a handful of active members in the founding, the organization grew quickly to 185 members in 1979. The AAPA’s membership figures have stabilized in the recent decade, with the most recent figure consisting of 500 members in 2005.

Over the past three decades, the association has been involved in a series of activities to advance the knowledge base and concerns of Asian Americans. From participating in the census advisory committee regarding the classification of Asian groups in the 1980 U.S. census (B. Yee, personal communication, December 20, 2005), to pressing the American Psychological Association (APA) to establish the Board of Minority Affairs (now Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs; (R. True, personal communication, December 23, 2005

to fighting against the English-language-only movement in California in (1986), the association has consistently advocated on behalf of Asian American psychology and the welfare of Asian Americans.

Table 2 lists the presidents of AAPA from 1972 to 2005. Figure 1 shows the founders of AAPA. Some of the association members have also achieved prominence in the APA’s governance. For example, Richard Suinn was one of the earlier chairpersons of the APA Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs, served as a member of the APA Board of Directors, and was the first Asian American psychologist to serve as the president of the APA in 1999. Alice Chang has also served on the Board of Directors for the APA. Other AAPA members have served as consultants in various governmental agencies. For example, Stanley Sue directed the training for the National Asian American Psychology Training Center in San Francisco in 1980 and established and served as the Director of the National Research Center on Asian American Mental Health from 1988 to 2001 at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Davis. However, the bulk of activities within the association have been focused on the dual themes of (a) educating and training Asian American psychologists and (b) improving mental health services to Asian Americans. Most of the activities of the association have been transacted through the journal and newsletter and the periodic AAPA conventions scheduled during the day before the start of the regular APA convention.

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Derald Wing Sue (left) and Stanley Sue, cofounders of the Asian American Psychological Association.

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Asian American Psychological Association Presidents (1972–2008)

Key Events and Conferences

Within psychology, as with other specialties, the development of the field has been marked by certain landmark conferences. For example, the first national training conference on clinical psychology was held in 1949 in Boulder, Colorado, where the scientist–practitioner model of training was adopted by the field. The first of these key conferences that help define our field was the San Francisco conference on Asian American mental health. In 1971 as a result of contacts among K. Patrick Okura, then Executive Assistant Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), James Ralph, Chief of the Center for Minority Mental Health Programs, and the Asian American Social Workers Organization, NIMH agreed to fund the first national conference on Asian American mental health. This 1972 conference, which was held in San Francisco, was intended to convene 81 delegates from throughout the nation to examine the mental health needs and priorities of Asian Americans. Conference organizers expected another 300–400 persons as participants/observers. However, more than 600 individuals attended, giving rise to much conflict and tension. Demand emerged for giving all participants a voice as delegates and tensions developed between different factions, for example, grassroots constituency versus agency professional groups. The more militant versus the less militant approaches to confronting the governmental agencies were discussed. Underlying the tension were feelings of frustration and anger over years of inadequate services and programs for Asian American and Pacific American communities. Details concerning some of the problems and tensions of that conference are available in the Conference Report Committee and also briefly reviewed by Sue and Morishima (1982) in their book.

For Asian American psychology specifically, the pivotal early conference was the National Asian American Psychology Training Conference held at Long Beach, California, from July 29 to August 1, 1976 (see Figure 2). Again, with the support from K. Patrick Okura and the board of the AAPA, Stanley Sue wrote a conference grant proposal to the NIMH to convene a national conference on the training of mental health service providers to serve Asian American communities. Albert H. Yee, Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the California State University, Long Beach, and members of AAPA board were instrumental in securing the conference site. The report from the conference (Sue & Chin, 1976) details both the process and the substantive content of the conference. A brief report on the conference was also published in the July 1978 issue of the American Psychologist (Dong, Wong, Callao, Nishihara, & Chin, 1978). The conference provided a setting for administrators, faculty, practitioners, and students to share perspectives on the mental health needs of Asian Americans. Among the outcomes of the conference were recommendations concerning appropriate models and approaches of psychology for Asian Americans and appropriate training of psychologists for Asian American communities. More specifically, the major objectives of the conference were (a) to gain a sense of the mental health service needs of Asian Americans from individuals who have active involvement with them; (b) to identify and recognize salient issues for various Asian American groups; (c) to abstract from the participants’ backgrounds and experiences both instances and preparation that would facilitate work with Asian Americans and instances of inadequate or counterproductive training for such work; and (d) to organize information gathered into a series of recommendations for improving the training of Asian American psychologists.

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The National Asian American Psychology Training Conference, Long Beach, California (July 31 to August 1, 1976). List of participants: Max Callao, Sam Chan, Robert Chin, Ki-Tack Chun, Jim Cortez, Tim Dong, Lloyd Inui, Davis Ja, Henry Johnson, John Jung, Bok-Lim Kim, Luke Kim, Harry Kitano, Margaret Kokka, Ramsey Liem, William Liu, Chalsa Loo, Barbara Lui, Roger Lum, Norman Mar, Tuan Nguyen, Aline Nishihara, Vincente Noble, Yukio Okano, K. Patrick Okura, Robert Ryan, Lindbergh Sata, Stanley Schneider, Helen Sing, Stanley Sue, Richard Suinn, Ruby Takanish, Gilfred Tanabe, Dalmas Taylor, Marion Tinloy, Reiko True, Leon West, Herbert Wong, Harry Yamaguchi, and Albert H. Yee.

The conference centered around two themes, the first of which is models of psychology for Asian Americans. The suggestions that evolved from the conference included the following: (a) Research much be conducted examining which psychotherapeutic materials and approaches are effective for Asian Americans and why such materials and approaches are effective. (b) Modification of traditional approaches should be made by incorporating information from community people and community workers in collaboration with researchers. (c) More Asian American psychology students should be encouraged into Asian American training programs in order to facilitate their awareness of Asian American concerns and to work in a relevant, supportive, intellectual, and experiential climate toward the conceptualization of Asian American psychology. (d) To meet the needs of Asian Americans, it is important to have a wide range of skills and competencies. Training should include exposure to different areas of psychology as well as to interdisciplinary fields. (e) Guidelines for competence for working with Asian Americans must be developed. These guidelines should be in areas of training and career education and licensing of psychologists.

The second theme concerned the specific training of psychologists for Asian Americans. It was recommended that courses on Asian Americans be offered and available to students. Additionally, Asian American perspectives in research and practice should be integrated into existing psychology courses such as in areas of social, community, and clinical psychology. The second level of recommendations was aimed at the establishing of centers for training psychologists to work with Asian Americans. Many of the issues raised and recommendations derived from that conference remain relevant to this day.

With the leadership of Tiffany Ho and some 27 years after the first Asian American mental health conference in San Francisco, the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) convened an Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Summit on July 10–12, 1999, in Washington, D.C. Leaders from government, academia, and the community were invited to this summit to discuss the mental health needs of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across the country. A Strategic Planning Committee was formed and in July 2000, the National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association (NAAPIMHA) was formed with D. J. Ida as its executive director.

From its inception, NAAPIMHA has focused on five distinct but interrelated areas: (a) Enhance collection of appropriate and accurate data; (b) identify current best practices and service models; (c) increase capacity building, which includes providing technical assistance and training of service providers, both professional and para-professional; (d) conduct research and evaluation; and (e) work to engage consumers and families. The underlying assumption is that a national organization should advocate on behalf of each of these areas and that cultural competency will be reflected at all levels.

Sue’s Testimony to Washington State Senate

One of the key moments in Asian American psychology’s relevance to public policy involved Stanley Sue’s early research with mental health service delivery. With funding from NIMH, Sue and colleagues (Sue, Allen, & Conaway, 1978; Sue & McKinney, 1975; Sue, McKinney, Allen, & Hall, 1974) had conducted a series of analyses of the data from 17 community mental health centers over a 3-year period in Seattle’s King County, Washington, and their analysis had demonstrated a high dropout rate for ethnic minority clients receiving treatment in the system. Sue et al. had concluded that the high dropout rate may be due to the existing services not meeting the needs of ethnic minority clients. Unknown to Sue at the time, the NIMH had contacted the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) to express their concern about inequities in service delivery across ethnic groups (Sue, 1992). The Washington State DSHS in turn challenged the findings by Sue on the grounds that 1 of the 17 mental health facilities included in the analysis may not have provided accurate data.

Sue was eventually asked by the Washington State Psychological Association to testify at a hearing of the Washington State Senate Subcommittee on Mental Health in 1979. To prepare for the hearing, Sue and colleagues reanalyzed the data without the data from the one facility in question and found that their results did not change. As a result of Sue’s testimony, the Washington State DSHS initiated new programs that were intended to offer culturally responsive services for ethnic minority populations, such as hiring more ethnic minority service providers and creating ethnic-specific service sites. An analysis of the same King County mental health system data 10 years later by independent investigators found that there were no longer differences between ethnic minority clients and White clients in the rate of premature termination from mental health treatment (O’Sullivan, Petersen, Cox, & Kirkeby, 1989).

Establishment of Parallel Services

Washington state was not the only place where Sue’s (1977) call to establish ethnic-specific (or parallel) services was heeded. In metropolitan cities across the nation, ethnic-specific mental health and substance abuse services have proliferated. For example, a nonprofit membership organization, the National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse’s (NAPAFASA) web site (www.napafasa.org) listed over 60 outpatient facilities and community-based organizations providing mental health and substance abuse treatment services to Asian American populations in 16 states. Among these service agencies, two are particularly noteworthy with respect to its historical significance for Asian American mental health service delivery.

San Francisco has historically been a key site for Asian Americans in both size and significance since the late 1800s, and the Asian American activism began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s. Among the first agencies to break the barriers to access for Asian Americans and to offer bilingual culturally relevant services were Chinatown/North Beach Mental Health Services and Chinatown Child Development Center. Following the leads of these agencies, the Richmond Area Multi-Services (RAMS; originally named Richmond Maxi-Center) located in the Richmond District of San Francisco, was established in 1974, making it one of the early pioneers in parallel service clinics for Asian Americans. The major goals of the RAMS were to provide community-based, culturally competent, and consumer-guided mental health services to residents of the Richmond district and the Asian American communities in San Francisco and San Mateo. As the largest private, nonprofit agency in San Francisco with an Asian focus (and more recently, also a Russian focus), RAMS provides bilingual bicultural services to a significant number of Asian American and other immigrants and refugees. In 1979, RAMS began operating the National Asian American Psychology Training Center (NAAPTC). This training center was originally funded by NIMH and was the first program in the United States to provide focused training on the delivery of mental health services to Asian American populations. Its predoctoral internship in psychology has been accredited by the APA continuously since 1980. Stanley Sue served as the Director of Clinical Training at the NAAPTC from 1980 to 1981. From 1990 until 2003, RAMS was headed by Evelyn Lee, who was a licensed clinical social worker and a national leader in Asian American mental health service delivery.

Also located in San Francisco and established in 1980, the Asian Focus Unit in San Francisco General Hospital’s (SFGH) Department of Psychiatry was the first inpatient psychiatric unit to provide culturally and linguistically competent services as well as training in the inpatient care of Asian American patients (see Gee, Du, Akiyama, & Lu, 1999). Subsequent to the establishment of this Asian Focus Unit, SFGH also established African American Focus Unit, Latino/a Unit, Women’s Issues Focus Unit, and Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT), and HIV/AIDS Focus Unit. Psychiatrist Francis Lu was the first program director of the Asian Focus Unit, followed by Evelyn Lee between 1982 and 1990. Notably, the unit survived a serious threat of elimination in 2000 due to budget shortfalls by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Contributions of Asian American Women Psychologists

In addition to the founding of the Division on Women in AAPA by Alice Chang and the pioneering work of Evelyn Lee at the Asian Focus Unit of San Francisco General Hospital, there were many other significant contributions by Asian American women psychologists. It is not possible to be exhaustive, but we highlight the accomplishments of some of these outstanding Asian American psychologists. For example, Larke Huang coedited the landmark book on Children of Color with Jewelle Taylor Gibbs (Gibbs & Huang, 1990) and was also the recipient of the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest in 2007. She was also appointed to the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health and served for several years as the Senior Advisor to the Administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Similarly, Ruby Takanishi made significant contributions to mental health policy, especially with regard to children and adolescents. Following her Congressional fellowship, she was founding executive director of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences in 1982 and director of the Office of Scientific Affairs of the APA from 1984 to 1986. From 1986 to 1996, Takanishi was executive director of the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, where she sought to raise the adolescent years higher on the national agenda. In 1997, she won the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy and was also awarded the AAPA Presidential Citation in 2005. Maria Root, winner of the 1997 APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest, has also made long-standing contributions to our understanding of biracial individuals in this country through her research and many books on the topic and is considered the leading national authority on the subject. She has also been a leading researcher on Filipino Americans.

Other leading Asian American women psychologists include Chalsa Loo, who was the first Asian American President of APA Division 45 by serving as copresident with John Moritsugu; Jean Lau Chin, who was the first Asian American president of APA Division 35 in 2002 and who has written and edited many important books on Asian American mental health and served the profession as an administrator at various institutions and universities; Yu-Wen Ying, whose pioneering research on Asian immigrant mental health with her 1988 Journal of Clinical Psychology article on depression among Chinese Americans has been cited over 100 times; and Ruth K. Chao, whose 1994 Child Development article on authoritarian parenting and the Chinese immigrant style of “training,” which demonstrated that authoritarian parenting is adaptive in some cultural contexts, has been cited 270 times. Connie Chan won the APA Division 44 Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Minority Issues in 1994 and has provided national leadership on LGBT issues.

Reiko True served as president of AAPA from 1997 to 1999, and she was able to establish financial stability within the association by expanding the financial contributions made to the annual convention. During her presidency, True also spearheaded the association’s support for the appointment of Bill Lann Lee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission as well as the support and formation of regional and networking groups and the organization of the National Multicultural Summit and Conference. Another of note is Christine Iijima Hall, who was elected the first female president of the AAPA and has served as the Director of the Office of Ethnic Minority Affairs at APA. Finally, it is important to note that Alice Chang was the first woman of color to be elected to the APA Board of Directors in 1994.

National Mental Health Policies and Activities

Another significant event was the 1977 President’s Commission on Mental Health, in which Stanley Sue and Robert Chin played a significant role in advancing the Asian American perspective on minority mental health. As was indicated by Sue and Moroshima (1982), the 1977 meeting of the Asian Pacific American Subpanel of the President’s Commission on Mental Health was attended by 25 national leaders in the mental health field and supported by the ideas of many other Asian Pacific American experts. At this meeting of the subpanel the group sought to evaluate mental health needs, to critique research service delivery programs, and to make recommendations for improving the mental health of Asian Americans. Many of the 76 recommendations are consistent with the ideas expressed by others. (a) Mental health policy should acknowledge unique cultures, lifestyles, and languages. (b) Asian Americans and Pacific Americans should be represented in positions involving governance and decision-making. (c) Bilingual and bicultural personnel should be available to Asian American and Pacific American clients in the mental health system. (d) Training programs, service delivery systems, and research should be improved so that the welfare of Asian Americans and Pacific Americans can be better promoted. (e) Racist practices must be eliminated.

With the 1999 White House Conference on Mental Health as the backdrop, the first-ever Surgeon General’s report on mental health and mental illness entitled Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 1999) was also issued that year. This report highlighted several themes: (a) Mental health is fundamental to health. (b) Mental illnesses are real health conditions. (c) The efficacy of mental health treatments is well documented. (d) A range of treatments exists for most mental disorders. However, the report noted that when compared with the White majority population, racial and ethnic minorities “bear a greater burden from unmet mental health needs and thus suffer a greater loss to their overall health and productivity” (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 1999, p. 3). Many in the racial and ethnic minority mental health professions felt that this very important message was lost in the Surgeon General’s report or at least not given the sufficient attention that it deserved. This lead to a complicated process whereby a supplement to the Surgeon General’s report entitled Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity—A Supplement to Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General was finally issued in 2001 (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2001). Once again, Stanley Sue, our leading authority on Asian American mental health, was pressed into service, and he wrote the chapter on Asian Americans (chapter 5) for the Surgeon General’s supplement. Please see the special issue guest-edited by Doris Chang (2003) in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry that provides an account and analysis of this complicated political process regarding the intersection of science and politics.

A quarter of a century after President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, President George W. Bush established the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in April 2002. The President directed the commission to identify policies that could be implemented by federal, state, and local governments to maximize the utility of existing resources, improve coordination of treatments and services, and promote successful community integration for adults with a serious mental illness and children with a serious emotional disturbance. From June 2002 to April 2003, the 22 commissioners met monthly to analyze the public and private mental health systems, visit innovative model programs across the country, and hear testimony from the systems’ many stakeholders, including dozens of consumers of mental health care, families, advocates, public and private providers and administrators, and mental health researchers. In addition to public comment, the commission consulted with nationally recognized professionals with expertise in diverse areas of mental health policy. The commission issued its final report, Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America in July 2003 (New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, 2003), which will serve as the blueprint of our national mental health policies for years to come. Fortunately, Larke Huang, one of the AAPA members, was appointed as one of the commissioners, and she ensured that the Asian American and Pacific Islander perspectives were represented in this highly important policy setting group. In 2005, Huang was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at the annual convention of the AAPA to share her experience and perspectives on serving on the New Freedom Commission.

Substantive Areas of Asian American Psychological Research

In order to provide an historical overview of the research content of Asian American psychology, Leong (1995) used the bibliography by Leong and Wittfield (1992), entitled Asians in the United States: Abstracts of the Psychological and Behavior Literature, 1967–1991, as the basis for identifying the content areas that have been most heavily researched with regard to Asian American psychology for that period. Using the topic classification provided by the database PsychInfo, Leong (1995) found that the most frequently researched areas with regard to journal articles included social processes and social issues, which constitute 22.9% of the journal articles on Asian Americans published between 1967 and 1991. This in turn was followed by health and mental health treatment and prevention, which constituted 19.3%, followed by educational psychology (11.5%), and psychological and physical disorders (10.6%).

In order to examine possible convergences in this pattern, Leong (1995) also analyzed the dissertation literature on Asian Americans in the United States between 1967 and 1991. Consistent with journal articles, it was discovered that the primary area covered by dissertations was also that of social processes and social issues, which constituted 28.7% of that literature. However, this was closely followed by educational psychology, which constituted 25.8%, which was double that of the journal articles. In addition, unlike the journal articles, 13.4% of the dissertations focus on developmental psychology, as opposed to only 9.5% of the journal articles. In summary, it appeared that social processes and social issues were the most heavily researched areas of Asian American psychology during that period. On the other hand, with regard to health and mental health treatment and prevention, considerably more attention was focused on those topics within the journal articles than in the dissertation studies. Dissertation topics on the other hand tended to focus more on developmental psychology and educational psychology. The journal articles tended to focus on treatment and prevention, psychological and physiological disorders, and to a lesser extent on educational psychology.

The relative amount of attention devoted to treatment, prevention, and psychological disorders is an important topic, because there have been continuing criticisms that that the AAPA, like APA, has been dominated by clinical and counseling psychologists. Thus, it appears that the journal literature from 1967 to 1991 appears to mirror the specialty training and background of the AAPA membership. However, it should be noted that this is a complex problem, and we cannot assume a direct linkage between these two trends. For example, the lower level of coverage of the “clinical” topics among dissertations may be due to the fact that those studies (which require access to clinical populations) may be more difficult to undertake for doctoral students.

Leong (1995) also proposed another way of obtaining an overview of the research content of Asian American psychology by identifying the leading contributors to the Asian American psychological literature from 1967 to 1991. He suggested that one could examine these individuals for their primary areas of research and contribution in order to identify the more popular specialty areas within the field. In examining the citation at the end of the Leong and Wittfield (1992) volume, it was discovered that the leading contributors to the Asian American psychological literature included Ronald C. Johnson (22 articles), Joseph Westermeyer (19 articles), Stanley Sue (18 articles), David Kinzie (18 articles), Craig T. Nagoshi (13 articles), Anthony Marsella (11 articles), Harry H. Kitano (11 articles), Donald Atkinson (10 articles), Jacquelyn H. Flaskerud (10 articles), Frederick T. L. Leong (10 articles), Kay Midlan (10 articles), and Joe Yamamoto (10 articles).

Leong (1995) noted that with few exceptions, most of these researchers focused on mental health issues with regard to Asian Americans. For example, Joseph Westermeyer’s work is primarily focused on immigrant and refugee mental health, whereas Stanley Sue’s work is focused on Asian American mental health, community issues, and mental health treatment. David Kinsey also researched immigrant and refugee issues, and Anthony Marsella researched issues with regard to mental disorders among Asian Americans.

Another way to examine the growth of attention to Asian American psychology would be to analyze the PsychInfo coverage of the topic over the last decade and a half. Using 1991 as the starting point, because the Leong and Whitfield (1992) volume covered literature until that period, we find that there were 1834 entries on Asians. Incidentally, Asians rather than Asian Americans is the preferred indexing term in PsychInfo because there are Asians in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Brazil, and so forth. Using the time periods established by the PsychInfo database, we found that the number of entries devoted to Asians grew from 1834 to 2739 in 1994, which was a 49% increase. It continued to grow from 2739 entries to 3558 entries in 1997 (29% increase), to 4147 in 1999 (16% increase), to 5148 in 2002 (24% increase), and finally to 6045 in 2005 (17% increase). In other words, the coverage of Asians in the psychological literature as represented in PsychInfo grew 229% in 14 years from 1991 to 2005.

Another perspective on the coverage of substantive areas is to review the various books that have been published on this topic. While there have been numerous books published on Asian Americans from the perspective of Asian American studies (e.g., Kitano & Daniels’, 2000, Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities), our present focus is on books with a psychological focus. The first two volumes on this topic were published by Stanley Sue with his colleagues: (a) Asian Americans: Psychological Perspectives, coedited by Stanley Sue and Nathaniel Wagner in 1973 (Sue & Wagner, 1973), and (b) Asian Americans: Social and Psychological Perspectives, Volume 2, coedited by Russell Endo, Stanley Sue, and Nathaniel Wagner in 1980 (Endo, Sue, & Wagner, 1980). With the increasing attention paid to this population and the growing literature, Stanley Sue obtained a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) with James Morishima to provide an overview to the Asian American mental health literature. The Handbook of Asian American/Pacific Islander Mental Health, Volume 1, was published by NIMH with Morishima, Sue, Teng, Zane, and Cram (1980) as editors. This volume was essentially an annotated bibliography, with Volume 2 providing the critical analysis of the literature. Volume 2 was later published as the now classic Mental Health of Asian Americans by Stanley Sue and James Morishima (1982) by Jossey-Bass. An updated annotated bibliography entitled Asians in the United States: Abstracts of the Psychological and Behavioral Literature, 1967–1991 was later coedited by Leong and Whitfield (1992) and published by the APA as part of the bibliography series on racial and ethnic minority groups. Incidentally, the Morishima et al. NIMH bibliography contained 401 entries, and the Leong and Whitfield bibliography covered 1750 entries. As was mentioned above, a recent search of the PsychInfo database found 6045 entries on Asians as of October 2005.

While the Sue and Morishima (1982) volume on the mental health of Asian Americans has remained a classic in the field, other volumes had also begun to emerge. For example, Laura Uba published her Asian Americans: Personality, Identity and Mental Health in 1994 (Uba, 1994; Guilford Press), which many have considered to be an update and successor to the Sue and Morishima (1982) volume. Some years later, Uba (2002) published A Postmodern Psychology of Asian Americans: Creating Knowledge of a Racial Minority (SUNY Press), a volume in which she suggested that Asian American psychology can move in a new direction by incorporating a postmodern perspective into our scholarship and teaching. At the same time, there were also other volumes devoted to specialty topics within Asian American psychology. One example is that by Zane, Takeuchi, and Young (1994) on health psychology, entitled Confronting Critical Health Issues of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans (Sage). Other examples of specialty books include Kurasaki, Okazaki, and Sue’s (2002) volume entitled Asian American Mental Health: Assessment Theories and Methods (Kluwer), which focused on assessment, and Evelyn Lee’s (1997) volume, Working with Asian Americans: A Guide for Clinicians, which focused on therapy and treatment. The most recent edition to the series of books was edited by Gordon C. Nagayama Hall and Sumie Okazaki (2002) under the title of Asian American Psychology: The Science of Lives in Context, which was published by APA Books. The chapters for this book were actually presented at a 1-day “think-tank” meeting during the 2000 AAPA convention. Of course, one knows that most fields of inquiry have actually matured when it launches a handbook, and this occurred with the publication of the Handbook of Asian American Psychology (L. C. Lee & Zane, 1998; Sage). The second edition of this Handbook of Asian American Psychology is now in preparation as part of the presidential initiatives of Frederick Leong with several members of his executive committee (Arpana Inman, Angela Ebreo, Lawrence Yang, Lisa Kinoshita, and Michi Fu).

Education and Training

As Leong (1995) had pointed out, one of the major developments that has assisted the education and training of Asian American psychologists tremendously is the formation of the Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) within the American Psychological Association. The MFP was funded by the federal government through various offices so that minority members would obtain special fellowships to become mental health professionals. These included psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and nurses. The Minority Fellowship Program for psychologists was administered by APA beginning in 1974. Throughout these 22 years (1974–2006) of funding, over 1100 students have been provided fellowships to become minority psychologists. Between 1974 and 2006, 191 fellows were Asian Americans, 108 in clinical track (clinical, counseling, and school psychology) and 594 in the mental health research track. In terms of the geographical breakdown of the Asian American minority fellows, the majority of the fellows came from California with 25. The other states that have high numbers of Asian American minority fellows included Massachusetts, Colorado, Hawaii, Washington, Illinois, Oregon, and Texas. Since an analysis by Leong (1995), the Minority Fellowship Program had continued to add different programs focused on neuroscience, aging, HIV/AIDS, and so forth In the recent issue of the MFP newsletter, Variability (Minority Fellowship Program, 2005), James Jones in his retirement statement indicated that the MFP had provided training support to over 1100 students. In recognition of his vision and leadership in providing training support to scores of Asian American psychologists over the years, the AAPA awarded Jones one of the Presidential Awards at its 2004 annual convention in Honolulu, Hawaii (http://www.apa.org/mfp).

Another important development in the education and training of Asian American psychologists was the Richmond Area Multi-Services (RAMS) organization (Leong, 1995), a community-based mental health agency located in the Richmond District of San Francisco and founded in 1974. As was described earlier, this nonprofit organization provided an excellent training facility for Asian American psychologists. The Richmond Area Multi-Services organization consisted of four programs: their outpatient and prevention services, the adult day treatment services, the Asian Family Institute, and the National Asian American Psychology Training Center. Stanley Sue was the first director of the National Asian American Psychology Training Center. Numerous Asian American psychology leaders were trained at RAMS, including Nolan Zane.

The Richmond Area Services and particularly the National Asian American Psychology Training Center has been funded by the federal government and has provided valuable training of clinical and counseling Asian American psychologists for the last 18 years. The value and the contribution of this center in the training of Asian American psychologists cannot be overestimated. RAMS is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary (http://www.ramsinc.org/ramshome.html).

Another institution that played a significant role in the education and training of Asian American psychologists was the Pacific/Asian American Mental Health Research Center (PAAMHRC), which was located at the then University of Illinois, Chicago Circle (now University of Illinois at Chicago). This was one of several ethnic-specific minority mental health research centers funded by the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1980s. Under the leadership of the principal pnvestigator, William Liu, who was a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, PAAMHRC ran research-training workshops for scores of Asian American psychologists and sociologists during that decade. Instructors for these training workshops included Stanley Sue from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Samuel Peng from the National Institute of Education.

Beginning in 1988, the Asian American ethnic specific mental health research center was awarded to the National Research Center on Asian American Mental Health (NRCAAMH), which was directed by Stanley Sue at UCLA. Eventually, the NRCAAMH was moved to the University of California, Davis, when Sue took a position at that university. With its numerous research projects, the center has attracted many talented Asian Americans into psychology and count among its staff some of the leading researchers in Asian American psychology. Nolan Zane, who had assisted Sue in writing that first grant proposal for the center, and served as its first associate director, recently assumed the directorship of the National Research Center on Asian American Mental Health (http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/nrcaamh/index.htm).

Future of Asian American Psychology

In 2002, the Asian American Psychological Association celebrated the 30th anniversary of the founding of the association by inviting Frederick Leong to be the opening keynote speaker. Leong (1995) had written the association monograph outlining the history of the association. He began by noting that the history of Asian American psychology needed to be understood within the context of the history of Asians in the United States and that a major theme in that historical record is that of “struggles against injustice.” These struggles included significant events such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese Internment during the Second World War. Moving on to organized psychology, Leong noted that the theme in his history monograph was that of “a struggle for inclusion,” in which the leaders of the association sought to have Asian American concerns and perspectives recognized and appreciated within the American Psychological Association. In over 30 years, AAPA has evolved into an active and vibrant association with over 500 members. As a significant step in this struggle for inclusion, the APA’s Council of Representatives is now considering the issue of creating a seat on that council for a representative from AAPA.

In that 2002 presentation, Leong also provided a glimpse into the future of Asian American psychology from his perspective. Using Hazel Markus and P. Nurius’ (1986) concept of “Possible Selves,” he introduced the concept of possible futures for the association. In the following scenarios of possible futures, he suggested the theme that might characterize the future of the association as one of “a little less struggle, a little more hope.” He presented some possible historical highlights for our next 30 years, with the hope that someone will be presenting some of these historical highlights at the 60th anniversary of AAPA:

AAPA elects its first non-Japanese and non-Chinese president… Perhaps Korean, followed by Filippino, Vietnamese, and Asian Indian.

The American Psychological Association elects its first Asian American woman as president.

A leading psychology department in the United States promotes the 20th Asian American to full professor rank…. Currently, there are about half a dozen.

AAPA celebrates the enrollment of its 1000th member (currently there are 500).

There are enough Asian Americans serving on the APA Council of Representatives that an Asian American Caucus is formed.

The government releases the 3rd edition of the Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health, and a major finding is that there is no longer an underutilization of mental health services among Asian Americans.

Some early winners of the AAPA Early Career Award in the late 1990s coedit the Encyclopedia of Asian American Psychology.

Predicting the future is always a hazardous undertaking for scientists, because so many variables are involved in the evolution and development of a field. What is clear from this historical review of Asian American psychology is that AAPA with all of its associated organizations and sister agencies is progressing along a trajectory of growth and development. Currently, there are already three generations of psychologists within the field, and as the second generation of Asian American psychologists takes over from the pioneering group, the third and latest generation is poised to also make their mark on the field. It is not inconceivable that most of the “possible futures” envisioned by Leong in his 2002 keynote address will come true.

References

1. Chan, S. (1991). Asian Americans: An interpretive history. New York: Twayne.

2. Chang, D. (2003). Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry.

3. Dong, T., Wong, H., Callao, M., Nishihara, A., & Chin, R. (1978). American Psychologist.

4. Endo, R., Sue, S., & Wagner, N. N. (1980). Asian-Americans: Social and psychological perspectives. Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books.

5. Gee, K. K., Du, N., Akiyama, K., Lu, F., Herrera, J. M., Lawson, W. B., & Sramek, J. J. (Eds.) (1999). Cross cultural psychiatry. New York: Wiley.

6. Gibbs, J. T., & Huang, L. N. (1989). Children of color: Psychological interventions with minority youth. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

7. Hall, G. C. N., & Okazaki, S. (Eds.) (2002). Asian American psychology: The science of lives in context. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

8. Kitano, H. H. L., & Daniels, R. (2000). Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities. NY: Prentice Hall.

9. Kurasaki, K. S., Okazaki, S., & Sue, S. (2002). Asian American mental health: Assessment theories and