Youth Suicide Prevention Initiative

One of the things that makes depression so scary is that it literally knows no limits in terms of who it affects. It has no regard for race, color, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation. I am a female teenager who was raised in a strict, upper-middle class Chinese family. I fit the stereotype of an academically high-achieving Asian student perfectly - I have perfect/near-perfect scores on all my standardized tests, earned numerous accolades for my success in the classroom, enjoy playing the piano, and am multilingual (I was raised bilingual in English and Mandarin, but have since also mastered French, Spanish, and German, through experiences living/traveling abroad and self-teaching). At school, I am well-respected (and even admired) by many of my peers. They would never suspect that anything was wrong, which added to my emotional burden when I became depressed. I appeared to have everything, but I just felt so alone and so worthless. I'm really glad this forum is open for people to talk about these issues. There exists a certain social stigma that seems to "look down upon" people with depression, and it is certainly prevalent in Asian culture, where people are expected to strive for excellence, to the point where they must "beat others" to get to the top. (One of the Chinese dialects, Hokkien, even has a special term for this attitude - it is called kiasu.) It's so nice to see that there is far more of a collaborative rather than competitive spirit here.