Asian American Mental Health: The Pressure to Succeed & Its Mental Health Consequences
Being Bad at Math While Being the “Model Minority”
I’m a Korean American who’s bad at math. Actually, correction: I no longer believe my aptitude for math is lower than average. I simply was not extraordinarily good at it like some of my Asian American peers in high school. While everyone else took pre-calculus, I was slumming it in regular old trigonometry. Although my high school had a large Asian population, there were so few Asians in the 11th grade regular math class that I felt out of place. Sometimes I sensed that my classmates wondered why I ended up in that class too, or maybe that was just my teenage self-consciousness. I learned from that experience that it’s a funny and complicated thing to subvert a racial stereotype.
This is one of the many ways in which I personally have experienced the Model Minority Myth, which is the stereotype that Asians in the US are universally successful. But what happens if you are an Asian person who can’t embody the “Model Minority” story? Maybe you were an English major and you didn’t go into a STEM field. Maybe you’re a 4th generation Chinese or Japanese American and your family over the generations acculturated to more mainstream American values and your parents didn’t demand that you be a straight A student? What is you tried one of the career paths that your immigrant Asian parents wanted for you but decided it wasn’t a fit and opted out? This is the problem with the broad group we have named “Asian American.” Few generalizations actually hold up across generations and ethnic groups under the big umbrella of “Asian American.” We have to be really nuanced in our understanding of ourselves as this big group, which is tough when American culture wants to flatten us into one thing.
Over the years, I’ve observed how difficult it is for Asian Americans to reconcile personal wishes and fantasies with the dreams of their parents. That’s a common story that gets a lot of airtime in therapy. But I actually think sometimes the more insidious experience is the pressure to succeed early, often, constantly. No matter what you do. Forgive me for stating the obvious here, but that’s really stressful and perhaps not the way reality works for all of us.
Mental Health Consequences: The Kids Are Not Alright
Young Asian American adults in particular are struggling with the pressure to succeed. The Asian American Foundation cited the following study in their September 2025 newsletter:
“an internal survey with College Pulse of 2,322 undergraduates in Aug-Sep 2024 found that 38% of Asian American students did not feel confident about their future career success—the highest among all racial groups.”
In other words, the racial group that is viewed by the broader culture as most likely to succeed actually is the least confident about their professional prospects. According to the report, the pressure to succeed is a significant stressor that contributes to mental health problems among young AANHPI adults. What the Model Minority Myth obscures is the psychological cost of striving to be the success that we and our families want us to be.
Depression and Anxiety Among Asian Americans
When we talk about mental health impact related to the pressure to succeed, we can get some additional clues by looking at research on Asian American mental health, which suggests that Asian American young adults may experience symptoms of depression and anxiety that may be higher than it is for other racial groups. However, there is other research that suggests the prevalence of depression and anxiety among Asian American adults is comparable to that of other racial groups. Although there is no unified generalization we can make about Asian Americans, most research concurs that Asian Americans are the least likely to seek professional help, which can make them particularly vulnerable to the dire effects of mental health problems.
Perfectionism, Fear of Failure, Procrastination/Avoidance Among Asian Americans
Research also suggests that perfectionism contributes to the mental health concerns of many Asian American young adults. In my clinical experience, perfectionism tends to be related to rigidity, a fixed mindset (rather than a growth mindset), and a great deal of avoidance and procrastination. Perfectionism used to strike me as a kind of harmless and charming flaw in myself and friends but when I started working with clients whose capacity for happiness was wrecked by their perfectionism, I started seeing how sinister it can become.
Perfectionism is a distorted way of thinking because it promotes a black and white mindset that is fundamentally maladaptive to reality. Moreover, perfectionism does not allow people to acknowledge that often failures are part of the path to success. Or, sometimes failures are opportunities to learn and grow in other ways, even if the realization is “Oh, I’m not good at this and I should do something else.” A person with a growth mindset will believe they are always learning and growing and even mistakes and setbacks can be a source of learning for positive outcomes in the future.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working in a college counseling center in a past life, it’s that college students deal with their fears through avoidance. Yes, I’m talking about the p-word we all know and love: procrastination. Perfectionism gets in the way of starting. It’s that simple. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has made a whole career about being the anti-perfectionist, that is, being willing to start where you are and build on that incrementally. It’s a powerful idea that astutely gets rid of the big problem we face: unreasonable expectations of ourselves.
Beyond the soul-crushing pressures it accompanies, perfectionism has some other drawbacks, such as killing our capacity for risk-taking and creativity. Perfectionists would find it hard to say to themselves, “Let’s try it out and see how it goes” even though that is a really helpful attitude for a young adult to adopt in some areas of their life. Perfectionism also feeds imposter syndrome because it suggests that a very high level of mastery and confidence are the evidence we have gotten good at a thing and that’s just not true for most people at different times in their lives (not just young adulthood).
Navigating Multiple Identities and Expectations
When I reflect on my own lived experience and the discussions I’ve had with other Asian therapists, I think the nature of existence for many AAPI people is multi-dimensional. That is, we are often navigating multiple identities and expectations, which can be confusing, fraught, and full of contradictions. We become extraordinarily good at code-switching, and perhaps in that endless adaptability, it’s easy to lose sight of a true and core self.
It’s common for there to be some differences in values between young adults and the older generations of their family, which can lead to alienation or conflict. I’ve observed in my practice that many parents and grandparents are not necessarily psychologically and emotionally prepared for their child to transition to adulthood, which shows up in their demand that the adult child “grow up” at the same time they become upset when the child asserts autonomy in an area they want to control. In many cases, family members are also not psychologically or emotionally prepared for their children who grew up in the US to be culturally different from them. So, things feel bad and tensions arise, voices get raised. Misunderstandings happen. In my experience, it’s often the adult child who is my client who has to simultaneously hold the different perspectives in order to get along with older family members. It can be a hard duty at times. Are these complicated family dynamics another layer in the onion of AAPI mental health? Absolutely.
What is Success?
I keep typing the words “succeed” and “success,” but what does that mean? How is it defined? What agency do we have in deciding what that means? Most Asian parents want their children to go into high income professions that are prestigious and/or secure. Think cardiologist, business executive at a large and well-known company, lawyer at a large corporate law firm. But can the anxious hopes of an immigrant parent be the compass that points a person to a good life? Not necessarily. Let’s look at the bigger picture of life. Yes, your career choices are important. But what I encounter more and more in therapy is that while people have focused on getting to the career and then through the career, the real work of living—the relationships, the self-worth, the internalized racism, the boundaries, the joy, etc.—is really daunting. The same parents who taught you the tenacity to study like your life depended on it might be suspiciously mum on other life topics. These same parents might be incredibly emotionally immature, which undermines the trust we can have in them when they give advice and guidance. I’m rambling a bit here. My point is: what the hell do your parents know about life? Like any other flawed and limited human being (myself included), not that much! They’re coming from their experiences, their anxieties, the dreams they want to vicariously live out through you, their limitations, their insecurities. So be cautious when you subscribe to someone else’s ideas of success.
The beauty of Asians in America is that sometimes our older family members adapt, learn, and grow with us. We’re in it together. They might say at the end of the day, “Okay, do what you want.” Even if you’d rather they give you their enthusiastic support instead of the sad resignation, take the win. Figuring out how to balance everyone’s wants and needs is a process and we can take it one day at a time.