Anxiety x South Asians

What is Anxiety?

For many of us we will experience symptoms of anxiety at some point in our life.

The official diagnosis of anxiety includes the following symptoms (taken from NIMH)

  • Feeling restless, wound-up, or on-edge.

  • Being easily fatigued.

  • Having difficulty concentrating.

  • Being irritable.

  • Having headaches, muscle aches, stomachaches, or unexplained pains.

  • Difficulty controlling feelings of worry.

  • Having sleep problems, such as difficulty falling or staying asleep.

We are seeing a growing body of research that suggests that South Asians experience and make sense of anxiety differently.

They are more likely to report physical symptoms such as headaches, body pains, fatigue and related to this concepts such as ‘tension’ are reported in South Asian communities.

What is interesting is that the experience of such psychological distress is not perceived to be an illness to be treated, it is understood to be a normal consequence to life events.

Some considerations we need:

  • How do we describe psychological distress like anxiety to South Asians? Is the western (medically aligned) construction of anxiety relevant to South Asians?

  • How could we encourage South Asians to share and help us to understand their language of psychological distress?

  • In what ways could we bridge the gap of conceptualisation and appropriate support?

Did you know about

Semen loss syndrome

The semen-loss sufferer experiences the following physical symptoms:

  • weakness

  • palpitations

  • aches

  • pains

It becomes a vicious cycle caused by anxiety and leads to semen loss and this perpetuates the psychological distress.

Read more

In a study of Women in Kerala, unmarried, widowed, divorced, and separated suffered more symptoms of somatization and reported higher levels of anxiety, compared to married women,

— Babu, Sreedevi, John, & Krishnapillai, V. (2019)

What is ‘tension’?

 

In a study by Karasz et al 2013, the psychological experience of tension is similar to stress. However chronic tension can lead to hypertension, diabetes etc (just like stress).

…tension as a response to the stresses of life in the United States: the loss of social status, poverty, poor housing conditions, and a general sense of disappointed hopes. The other major cause of tension was loneliness, following the separation from family and friends. Gender related issues, including psychological and physical abuse, low status within the family, conflict with the husband or in-laws, and a humiliating lack financial independence, were another important antecedent of ‘tension.’