It can be hard to get young people from Minnesota’s Asian communities to speak openly about substance abuse, experts and community leaders say. One approach that can work is by finding common ground through athletics, video games – or even by offering free haircuts.
With anecdotal evidence suggesting an uptick in substance abuse among Karen and Hmong youth, Sahan Journal and MPR News sponsored a gathering of experts, social workers and community leaders November 14 at Washington Technology Magnet School in St. Paul.
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Say Klo Wah, a youth case manager for the Karen Organization of Minnesota, said it’s hard to get through to many Karen youth because they aren’t accustomed to talking about topics like addiction.
“With Karen tradition, people don’t usually tend to talk about their feelings or the things they struggle with,” Say Klo said. “So by the time parents come to us to help their kids, their kids are already highly addicted to drugs. It’s making it harder to help them.”
Say Klo said despite many Karen youth being slow to open up, he can usually get through to them by finding common ground, allowing him to have more personal conversations about substance abuse.
Going to the gym together, offering free haircuts, and playing soccer and videogames are all ways Say Klo said he’s been able to get youth to open up to him.
“That’s how I build relationships with them,” he said. “But they’re all different, they have different personalities, and it takes time to get to know them one-by-one.”
Dr. Dziwe Ntaba, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Minnesota, said data doesn’t show dramatically different rates of substance abuse among demographic groups, but it does show a disparity in health and social outcomes.
“Minneapolis has some of the worst health disparities in outcomes when it comes to opiate overdose deaths,” Ntaba said.
“The data that’s available shows for Black Minneapolitans compared to white Minneapolitans, it’s about a four-to-one increased chance of an overdose death,” Ntaba said. “If you look at indigenous communities, that number is 30-to-1.”
Young people also are more likely to die than older people. Youth across the country are experiencing the highest increase in overdose deaths compared to the rest of the population, Ntaba said.
Panelists said it would help to eliminate the shame and stigma associated with addiction.
Abdirahman Mukhtar, founder of Daryeel Youth, a nonprofit targeting substance abuse in East African youth in the Twin Cities, said he goes out every Friday evening to talk to youth in his community. Sometimes, he wears a Minnesota Vikings hat, which he said helps start conversations with young people who might otherwise not want to talk about their addiction.
Mukhtar’s advice to the Karen and Hmong communities was to create more awareness.
“The most important thing is having an open discussion about the link between mental health and substance abuse, and finding a way to have culturally appropriate outreach for every community,” Mukhtar said.
In Islam, consumption of drugs and alcohol is a sin and when a community stigmatizes drug use, it makes it significantly harder to address, Mukhtar said. Some families with children who have overdosed will deny it ever happened to avoid the shame associated with drug use, he said.
“Within our culture we don’t even talk about mental health,” Mukhtar said. “We don’t even have the terminology to talk about mental health, let alone substance abuse.”
François Vang, a Hmong clinical social worker in the Twin Cities, echoed much of what his fellow panelists said about the influence of shame.
“Our culture—I’m just going to name it—uses shame as a tool to really ground people in their role, their identity,” Vang said.
The key, Vang said, is to avoid finger pointing and recognize the issues that community members are facing.
“It starts with us, it starts with the community,” Vang said.
Watch the full conversation
