Our Mission
The Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Cross-Cultural Student Emotional Wellness is a consortium of clinicians, educators, and researchers who are passionate about understanding and promoting the emotional health and psychological resilience of students and scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds. Our Center focuses on three main areas:
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Education and primary prevention
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Research
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Consultation, treatment and referral
History
The Center was founded in 2014 by three Boston-based physicians (see Our Team) who recognized a tremendous need to support the emotional health of students from non-Western cultural backgrounds. As practicing mental health clinicians, they noticed increasing referrals of Asian American students for problems like anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. As bicultural individuals themselves, with perspectives informed by diverse experiences including clinical work with Asian and Western patients, public health training, and parenthood, they agreed the solution to these problems lay not in increased mental health treatment, but rather in early recognition, education, and primary prevention.
New England is home to some of the most prestigious secondary schools and universities in the country. The stress faced by students in these competitive environments is enormous – and this is magnified among individuals whose cultural backgrounds make it difficult to integrate easily into U.S. educational and social systems, who struggle to establish social networks with their Western peers, and who bring different cultural values and practices to campus. Meanwhile, educational institutions often struggle with the challenge of providing appropriate support to these students.
Recognizing these factors, our program has partnered with a diverse group of local and regional stakeholders to tackle these complex challenges and improve the lives of diverse student populations.
Please click on the links above to learn more about our team, the services we provide, resources and articles of interest, and how you can support our work.