Permission to Come Home: Reclaiming Mental Health as Asian Americans

Weaving her own personal narrative as a Taiwanese American and insights as a clinician with evidence-based tools, a clinical psychologist offers readers permission to embrace their mental and emotional self-care while understanding and honoring the richness of their heritage. 50,000 first printing.
„The first of its kind, Permission to Come Home is a crucial resource for the rapidly growing community of Asian Americans, immigrants, and other minorities and marginalized people to practice mental and emotional self-care. This book helps readers work on their mental health while understanding and honoring the richness of their heritage and embodying a new, complete, and whole identity. Throughout, Dr. Jenny Wang weaves together personal stories of strength, pain, and resilience with incisive analysis of Asian American and immigrant identities and how they affect our individual and collective mental health“--
“Dr. Jenny T. Wang has been an incredible resource for Asian mental health. I believe that her knowledge, presence, and activism for mental health in the Asian American/Immigrant community have been invaluable and groundbreaking. I am so very grateful that she exists.”—Steven Yeun, actor, The Walking Dead and MinariAsian Americans are experiencing a racial reckoning regarding their identity, inspiring them to radically reconsider the cultural frameworks that enabled their assimilation into American culture. As Asian Americans investigate the personal and societal effects of longstanding cultural narratives suggesting they take up as little space as possible, their mental health becomes critically important. Yet despite the fact that over 18 million people of Asian descent live in the United States today — 5.6 percent of the population — they are the racial group least likely to seek out mental health services. Permission to Come Home confronts and destabilizes the stigma Asian Americans face in caring for their mental health. Weaving her personal narrative as a Taiwanese American and insights as a clinician with evidenced-based tools, Dr. Jenny T. Wang offers readers permission to embrace their mental and emotional self-care while understanding and honoring the richness of their heritage and embodying a new, complete identity. In ten chapters, each one focusing on a central theme—from recognizing emotions, to establishing boundaries, managing anger, and introducing play into one’s life—Dr. Wang presents a road map for the journey to wholeness.