Alan Lee, a fourth-year medical student at Yale School of Medicine, has been awarded a 2021-22 Helping Hands Grants Program award through the American Psychiatric Association Foundation and Yale School of Medicine’s program Compassionate Home, Action Together (CHATogether).
CHATogether was founded and is directed by Eunice Yuen, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. The group uses drama vignettes as education tools to promote emotional wellness in Asian American children, young adults, and parents. Lee is the group’s Theatre Acting Director and Research Consultant.
Lee will develop a project that will help improve Asian American mental health due to problems that arise from parent-child conflict.
For example, according to Lee, many Asian American children discussed how their parents did not understand the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and had negative views about Black Americans. “This was creating lots of conflict in families,” he said.
One of the big things we do is that we try to teach these ways to talk to parents using theater because we think it makes it more approachable and gives people concrete examples of how to do these things.
Alan Lee, fourth-year medical student, Yale School of Medicine
He looked in the literature on what techniques help people become more empathetic and compassionate, and then wrote a theater skit where a parent and child talk about racism against Black Americans that incorporates those techniques. He also created material like written conversation guides to help people have these talks. He enlisted people to act out the theater skit to teach others how to have these conversations.
“One of the big things we do is that we try to teach these ways to talk to parents using theater because we think it makes it more approachable and gives people concrete examples of how to do these things,” he said. “We also did a similar project earlier this year that was focused on helping Asian Americans talk to their parents about the increasing amounts of violence and racism against Asian Americans.”