Breaking the silence around mental health in Vietnamese American families
A new generation of therapists is building culturally specific practices from scratch, often without a roadmap.
By Dr. Mai Huynh · June 20, 2025 · 6 min read
When therapist Diem Nguyen opened her practice five years ago, she assumed the harder part of the job would be the clinical work. Instead, she says, the harder part has often been the first phone call — persuading a prospective client's parents that therapy isn't an admission of family failure, and that seeing a counselor doesn't mean something has gone catastrophically wrong.
That resistance, Nguyen and other Vietnamese American therapists say, is rooted less in any single cultural belief than in a specific historical gap: an entire generation that survived war, displacement, and resettlement largely without access to, or language for, mental health support, and who came to associate psychological struggle with personal weakness rather than a treatable condition. Their children, many now practitioners themselves, are building a professional vocabulary around mental health almost from scratch within their own community.
"There wasn't a Vietnamese word my parents used for what I'd now call anxiety," Nguyen said. "There was just 'lo,' worry, and the expectation that you handled it quietly and kept working." Several of her colleagues describe spending as much time on cultural translation — helping older family members understand what therapy actually involves — as on direct treatment, particularly in cases where a younger client wants a parent's buy-in before continuing sessions.
The demand, therapists say, is outpacing the supply of bilingual, culturally fluent providers by a wide margin, particularly outside major metro areas. Several are experimenting with group workshops at community centers and temples as a lower-stakes entry point than one-on-one therapy, hoping that a more communal, less clinical setting will reach people who would never otherwise walk into an office. "We're not trying to replace what a good listening ear at a family dinner does," Nguyen said. "We're trying to be there for the people who don't have that dinner to go to."