Mental Health Awareness

Why raising mental health awareness for first gen professionals and the Latino community is so important:

👉🏽There is still a lot of stigma in these communities for experiencing mental health challenges. There’s stigma around seeking therapy. People may say you’re crazy or loco/a. So we often don’t talk about what’s going on, or seek therapy or we hide that we have a therapist.

👉🏽There is a history of so much anxiety and depression that was rarely/never medically diagnosed but exists in many of our family histories. We aren’t always told of this history.

👉🏽Pushing through no matter what is a belief ingrained in us as a strength because our parents were often in survival mode and we saw them push through.

👉🏽We guilt ourselves and use “just be thankful” as a weapon against ourselves when we are going through a hard time. Our feelings of hardship are valid but we minimize them, telling ourselves we should just be grateful for what we have and stop complaining or wanting something better.

👉🏽Similarly, we often look at the struggles of our ancestors, community and parents and say: they had it worse than me so I’m not going to complain. Instead, we bottle it all up.

👉🏽We will rarely ask for help. We weren’t taught to trust easily. We often grew up in protection mode.

👉🏽We often feel the need to prove ourselves. It’s not just on us. Because we are so underrepresented in leadership in law firms and corporate america, its harder for us see ourselves in those positions and to feel like we truly belong in the spaces we occupy.

👉🏽Our work ethic is insane and our expectations of ourselves will always be higher than ones others have of us. But it can harm our well-being. We can work work work to get it all done. We will work to the point of exhaustion and burnout, because of the two previous reasons I mentioned.

👉🏽We grew up seeing self-sacrifice as the norm so taking care of ourselves first and prioritize self-care is a major mindset shift and behavioral change for us.

Maybe these are more universal and you can relate to these.

What resonates the most?

#mentalhealthawareness #firstgeneration #latinaleaders #latinaprofessionalsLatina ProfessionalsHispanic ExecutiveALPFA, Inc - Association of Latino Professionals For America