After a long evening spent with other dissenting writers in 2001, I hailed a rickshaw to take me home. Previously, a ride late at night in my hometown, Barishal, Bangladesh, would not have worried me, but this was an anxious time. 

A few months prior, two political parties, the Jamaat-e-Islami and Bangladesh Nationalist Party, unexpectedly formed a coalition government around Islamist, nationalist principles. Just 16, I was among an angry younger generation who knew the Jamaat-e-Islami as an Islamist party that helped the Pakistani army kill hundreds of thousands of people during the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh. 

Now the party controlled our beloved country again. They committed some barbaric acts, such as burning houses belonging to Hindus, a minority religious group in Bangladesh. I began publishing a literary magazine with editorials criticizing the new government, and the local Jamaat-e-Islami members took notice.

As the rickshaw pulled onto the street where my family lived, a group of men with handkerchiefs covering their faces were waiting for me. The rickshaw driver vanished in fear, and I felt a sharp pain from being stabbed on my left side. I ran toward our apartment, banged on the door and screamed in pain as the group fled the scene. Though my clothes today conceal the 5-inch scar carved into me that night, the memory is still fresh.

I’m not alone among refugees in having such nightmarish memories, nor in my decision to share them. As war, political unrest and climate change drive ever-larger numbers of people to flee their homelands, it’s easy for societies on the receiving end of the flow to wonder: Why don’t people stay home? Why don’t they fight to improve their countries?

For me, the answer is: I tried.

Kidnapped at gunpoint

Being attacked didn’t stop me; I recovered and fervently published more. I wrote for other magazines across the country. A few years passed, and the looming general election bred hope that the final days of the dual-party coalition government were drawing near. 

On a chilly night in 2006, I was again reminded that my writing was not considered appropriate by everyone. While walking home, I was kidnapped at gunpoint by a government law-enforcement agency.

The commanding officer put his 9mm pistol to my head and asked, “How cold is it?” Then his team blindfolded me, beat me with wooden sticks and squished me in the back floorboard of the car. 

I remember the painful pressure as they pushed their feet on me. I assumed they would take me to their headquarters, but they drove me out of town, removed the blindfold and told me to get out of the car. As I looked around and saw a field, I heard someone say, “The last moment of your life has arrived.” I tasted blood, and though my mouth was bleeding, I could not reach up to wipe as my hands were tied behind my back. 

I next remember them driving me to their heavily militarized station with tall brick walls, where I was continuously beaten for the next four hours. Hog-tied, my hands were restrained in front of me, and my legs were lashed to a metal pole. I was interrogated about my writing; they wanted to know why I was mad at the Islamist leadership. Toward the end of the questioning, a doctor entered the room and gave me some medicine. I did not trust him, so I discreetly spat the pills out after he departed.

I could not sleep the whole night as I watched the sky from my tiny prison window. I remember understanding that night the value of art in a time of emergency, and I promised myself I would never be compromised in this regard. The next evening, they left me on the street and told me to leave the town before the election.

On an al-Qaida-related hit list

But I didn’t leave because I had important university exams to take.

The elite force returned to my house a week later. I was afraid, so I went into hiding in a neighboring town. Using a pen name, I continued writing newspaper articles advocating for a more secular Bangladesh.

After the coalition government lost the election a few months later, I felt it was safe and returned to my hometown. I continued writing and publishing and reading my poetry at public gatherings, marches and candlelight vigils as part of a nationwide effort led by activists and bloggers in 2013 pushing for a trial against prominent Islamist leaders accused of war crimes dating back to 1971.

Fundamentalist groups started counter-protests and declared war against the activists and the bloggers. In 2015, a local al-Qaida-related militant organization published hit lists, and one for my hometown included three poets, myself included. I went to the police for protection, but they made copies of my writing. Feeling unsafe, I went into hiding.

I went to my relatives in a nearby village, but they had seen the list on TV and in newspapers and were terrified. I spent one night with them and then went 10 hours away to Chittagong, the second largest city in Bangladesh, and lived with a friend. Later, when I realized someone had started following me, I left and moved through four different cities. 

I received news that two different militant groups attacked two publication houses at the same time. One publisher was killed, and three other people were injured. During these attacks, the publishers’ pictures were broadcast in the media, and old video footage of me speaking was included, putting me at even greater risk.

From disorientation to blending in

Like fellow writers being persecuted in Bangladesh, I applied to the International Cities of Refuge Network in Norway. I was very fortunate that soon after, Carnegie Mellon University invited me to be a visiting scholar, and City of Asylum invited me to join their Exiled Writer and Artist Residency Program. I left Bangladesh in 2016 and moved to Pittsburgh’s North Side. During the month I arrived, I learned that four writers were killed in Bangladesh and I received additional threats, so I decided to apply for asylum.

I was depressed that I had to leave behind my life, my family and my belongings, but I was relieved that I didn’t need to look behind my shoulder to see if an assassin was following me. The support from the City of Asylum was life-changing as I was provided a stipend, a quiet, furnished house and other support as needed.

I felt safe and secure in this house, and it enabled me to complete a poetry manuscript in which I shared my experiences in exile, and my debut book, “Exile Poems”, published in 2022 by Pittsburgh-based press Bridge & Tunnel Books.

I also wrote my first novel, about the persecution of the Hindu religious minority in Bangladesh, which I was unable to write when I lived in Bangladesh because of the fatal consequences for writers who question religious-based oppression. Though I miss my friends back home, I am fortunate to have made good friends here with whom I can share my thoughts and concerns. My neighbors have been welcoming; even those I don’t know will often wave hello as they pass by. 

I had never left my home country before I came to Pittsburgh, and moving to an unknown place where people speak a different language and share different customs felt disorientating when I first arrived.

Local organizations that help immigrants navigate life in Pittsburgh, such as Literacy Pittsburgh and Jewish Family and Children’s Services, offered me long-term English classes, computer training and other career development services. I received a grant to translate my works from Bengali to English from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, which enables me to continue writing as I connect my former life as a dissident in Bangladesh to my new identity in Pittsburgh, thus bridging my own culture with my audience here in Pittsburgh. 

Though coming to Pittsburgh provided me with safety and protection, standing up for literary and political freedom required me to physically separate myself from my family and homeland — an immense pain that I feel every moment. My initial culture shock has lessened over the years, which suggests to me I have become more blended into American society.

At a recent poetry event in Pittsburgh, Jason Irwin read his poem, “Darién Gap,” which describes the dangerous journeys of asylum seekers who cross the jungle in Panama to reach the United States. Though I had a different path, I relate to their experiences, and I know that I will continue to fight for the freedom of expression because it’s worth risking everything to ensure basic human rights are protected. 

Tuhin Das is a Bangladeshi writer who lives in Pittsburgh and former writer-in-residence at City of Asylum and can be reached at dastuhinbd@gmail.com.

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Content warning: This story contains references to suicide.

If Khara Timsina showed signs of a mental health struggle in his country of origin, he could be called a “mad person.” 

“And people would fear talking to me, coming near me, and they would point fingers,” he said. “The type of stigma the community has, comes with the culture we had back in our country.”

While negative perceptions of those struggling with mental health exist everywhere, the stigma is particularly sharp for Bhutanese refugees, suggested Timsina, executive director of the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh [BCAP].

“People don’t like to be called, having mental health issues, so with that social taboo they are not open,” Timsina said.

He’s hoping Mental Health First Aid training might be a step toward addressing a problem that has sometimes manifested in suicides, especially among the men of the community.

BCAP offered the training last month, for the third time in eight years. Members of the Bhutanese community are hoping it has ripple effects, as the attendees share what they’ve learned with family and friends and slowly counter perceptions that make mental health challenges so hard to address, especially in a population that has had to overcome so many hardships.

A familiar problem for the community

Pittsburgh’s Bhutanese community are ethnic Nepalese who, starting in the 1990s, were forced out of their homeland after Bhutan’s government adopted stringent nationalist policies. Some spent as much as 20 years in refugee camps in Nepal after fleeing discrimination and violence in Bhutan. Refugees began arriving in Pittsburgh in 2008, and have since become one of the city’s largest immigrant groups. 

While Bhutanese immigrants in Pittsburgh have developed strong roots in areas along the Route 51 corridor in Carrick, Brentwood and Baldwin, their community has been facing mental health challenges consistent with findings that show a higher suicide rate in Bhutanese refugees across the United States. A 2012 report by the CDC shows that in the U.S., Bhutanese refugees have a suicide rate of 20.3 per 100,000, which is almost double that of the national suicide rate of 12.4 per 100,000. The study found the highest suicides rates in unemployed men who were not family providers. 

A 2019 study into the reasons behind their higher suicide rate found that societal pressures related to resettlement in a new country — including trouble finding employment — language barriers and financial stress, all contributed to feelings of distress in Bhutanese refugees. A community-wide tendency to avoid talking about mental health worsened feelings of distress, the study found.

In Timsina’s opinion, stigma around mental health in the Bhutanese community comes from deep-rooted cultural beliefs about people who exhibit signs of mental illness. This can make it hard for members of the Bhutanese community to seek help or verbalize their distress, which can worsen the problem.

“The type of stigma the community has comes with the culture we had back in our country,” Timsina said. “There weren’t any categories of mental health.”

Timsina continued: “The community still thinks that [mental health] is not an illness. It’s because of some superstitions, like something bad is acting on you.”

In his experience, Timsina has seen that when men fall victim to mental health stigma, they turn to destructive behaviors that not only cause further hurt to themselves, but to their families and wives, too. 

“It’s men’s inability to cope, or less capacity to cope with stress, and sometimes it begins from them, but the silent suffering is more on the women’s side. They bear it. They think they have to live for their kids,” Timsina said. 

Benu Rijal, BCAP’s health coordinator, said that she’s noticed the severity of the problem through her experiences leading a women’s group at BCAP. Whereas Rijal believes Bhutanese men often feel societal pressure to keep their emotional struggles to themselves, she has seen women be more comfortable expressing their problems. 

“I think men think they are more the boss of the family and they normally don’t come to share with us problems,” Rijal said. “I think the women are more open, and they cry and they talk to people. They want to feel relief and they share.”

Communication, transportation and mental health

Language challenges — most acute for adults — can make it harder to acclimate and to verbalize mental health struggles.

Not understanding English “is making someone homebound all the time,” Timsina said. 

Sabitra Kadariya, a Bhutanese mother living in Brentwood since 2010, added that many members of the community are further isolated because they can’t drive.  

“I think they have not enough financial support to buy a car, or to support their families and because of that, it’s the first thing that leads them to commit suicide,” said Kadariya.

In recent years, however, Kadariya has noticed a change: As more members of the Bhutanese community receive help accessing public resources, they help out others in turn. 

“I noticed that my family members or friends like to help other members of the family or close friends,” Kadariya said. “They pick them up and drop them from work to home, and then they know how to use public resources, like the buses. … So that will minimize, I think, the mental [health] issues.”

The combined power of peer-support and greater community resources is something that Timsina hopes to harness through Mental Health First Aid training. To help alleviate mental health crises, Mental Health First Aid training teaches ordinary people how to help those around them.

Mental Health First Aid training

For the third time since 2015, The Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh hosted Mental Health First Aid training for their community members on Oct. 14. About 30 men and women from the Bhutanese community gathered from early morning to late afternoon with coffee and snacks at the Intra-National Homecare building in Whitehall to learn what they could do to help their friends and family who are struggling with their mental health. 

“We are a large community here in Pittsburgh, and like suicidal thoughts, like people dying by suicide — we heard that every day in the news,” Kadariya said. “Because of that, I like to attend Mental Health First Aid training … and then export knowledge to my community.”

Mental Health First Aid Training [MHFA] teaches individuals how to help people struggling with mental illness or mental health crises. The point is not to make a community member into a clinician. Rather, MHFA teaches people how to be an informal, but vital, support for people struggling with mental health or experiencing a mental health crisis.

The 8-hour course, first introduced in the U.S. in 2008, has been proven to help immigrant and refugee populations like the Bhutanese community increase mental health literacy, reduce stigma and feel better equipped to notice signs of a mental health crisis and be a first line of support.

MHFA training includes an introduction to different mental health terms, lessons on how to recognize risk factors and warning signs of a mental health crisis, with video and text-based scenarios. Participants are also taught a step-by-step action plan for how they can help someone experiencing a mental health crisis.

Through open group discussions, Bhutanese community members brainstormed how they could use strategies like non-judgmental listening, creating safe spaces, being aware of body language and avoiding dismissive statements when approaching a person about their mental health.

Following the training, attendees shared that they wanted to see additional MHFA training offered in the Bhutanese community so that more people can support mental health awareness.

Tulashi Adhikari, of South Park, said he heard about the MHFA training on BCAP’s Facebook page and thought it would be a valuable way to learn more about a problem he sees affecting many of his friends and neighbors.

“Today our trainer did the training for more than 30 people, so at least 30 people can tell at least one or two people, then it will increase day by day,” Adhikari said.

 “This is a great opportunity to have this kind of training in our community so that we can know what is going on, what the causes are and how we can solve the problem,” Adhikari added.

For Tika Sapkota, a Jefferson Hills resident and a peer support specialist for the Squirrel Hill Health Center, the recent MHFA training was not his first, but he noted that it was for a lot of attendees. While Sapkota said he felt this training will help community members start more conversations around mental health, he hopes for more.

“We have a big community … so getting this much training is not enough,” Sapkota said. “If there can be more of these trainings regularly, [community members] may understand more and help more.”

Timsina said one of the goals of doing the MHFA training is to reduce the cultural stigmas around people who struggle with mental health. While many community members do notice those around them struggling, lack of education on mental health and negative cultural perceptions make it difficult for them to know where to begin when it comes to helping, or even speaking out.

Through MHFA training, Timsina said he hopes his community will begin to see mental health as an important piece of overall health.

“The kind of education we want to provide is that it’s okay to feel bad. It’s okay to feel some kind of mental pressure — everybody else feels it,” Timsina said. “But like you have a stomach ache or a headache, you tend to go to a doctor. There is treatment for how you feel, too.” 

BCAP staff can only do so much

Sapkota notes that one of the greatest impacts of mental health education in the Bhutanese community is simply giving mental health language to community members that can help them verbalize their struggles. 

“Culturally, our people don’t want to express even to the family members,” Sapkota said. “We don’t express bad things.”

“When it gets too bad, and they see their primary doctor, the doctor will ask how long this has been going on, and they’ll say a long time,” Sapkota continued. 

Bishnu Timsina, a former BCAP board member and the wife of Khara Timsina, who has provided support to parents and families in the Bhutanese community since 2010, said in her experience, stigma plays a large role in these communication issues.

“Where we come from, traditionally mental health was not really seen as mental health — it was seen as like a different planet thing,” she said. “So, it was not easy to work with any families or parents.”

In a 2015 study done on the effectiveness of MHFA training for the Bhutanese community at Temple University, researchers found that participants in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Harrisburg scored higher on their ability to recognize signs of depression and provide first aid responses based on the “ALGEE” plan after the training.

The study did not find a significant change in the part of the assessment that screened for “stigmatizing attitudes.” The authors, however, noted that might have been caused by the MHFA training instructors not being from the Bhutanese community, and suggested the training could be culturally adapted.

At the training BCAP hosted this October, the instructor was a member of the Bhutanese community and the instruction and conversations were done primarily in Nepali, allowing community members and the instructor to joke around and talk freely in their first language.

In Kadariya’s opinion, adapting mental health education to the language needs of the Bhutanese community, especially for elders, can help bridge this gap.

“Our moms, our dads – they don’t speak English — but we can explain them in Nepali what is mental health, how it disrupts the families, and how we have to help each other in our communities,” Kadariya said. 

Kadariya said this education can catalyze the way she believes the community members already lean on one another.

“They definitely support one another, but due to lack of some knowledge, some people are not helpful,” Kadariya said. “But we can talk to them about what mental health is, so we can educate the people about this, and then definitely, they can help each other.”

For Bishnu Timisina, the eagerness community members have begun to express for more MHFA training and to start spreading what they’ve learned is an exciting prospect — both for the future health of the community and for the reach of Bhutanese community workers. 

“If we do this to more people … I think there will be less victims, because there will be more people to get help from,” Timsina said.

Katie Mirr, BCAP’s youth and families coordinator, said the organization’s five staff can only do so much. “Those people that may have been on the fence are, when they’re seeing their friends or family members talk about [MHFA] and promote it, that might help them as well because they’re seeing like, ‘It’s coming from BCAP, but it’s also coming from my brother and my cousin,’” Mirr said. “Building it up that way, I think, is the only way that it’s going to work.”

A model for community mental health

The power that peer support can have on community mental health is something that Joni Schwager, executive director of the Staunton Farm Foundation*, one of the funders of BCAP’s MHFA training, sees as a great lift for the Bhutanese community.

“We believe that they [the Bhutanese community] are the best equipped to offer and train people from their community as opposed to anybody else because they know their community,” Schwager said. 

Schwager believes that the type of peer support MHFA providers do will work well for the Bhutanese community because those in it understand the nuances in culture, attitudes toward mental health and the experiences of immigrants and refugees that all play into the mental health experiences of Bhutanese people living in the U.S. 

“It’s a lot easier to talk to somebody who you know has had that experience as opposed to somebody who has a degree next to their name,” Schwager said.

To Schwager, MHFA in the Bhutanese community represents a significant shift in the way communities can address public mental health. 

“I think that we are in a period now where we’re realizing the power of communities and things like Mental Health First Aid equip a community to be able to reach out to their own friends, neighbors and loved ones in a way that if you don’t have the right training, you wouldn’t feel as comfortable doing.”

The greater level of comfort — both to be vulnerable in sharing and in learning — that peer support models like MHFA create, is something that Bishnu Timsina said she has noticed take root in the Bhutanese community. 

“I have seen more people coming out and seeking help. Families used to keep it within the family in the past, but they’re coming out now, and seeking help,” Timsina said. “This stigma is loosening.”

* PublicSource receives support from the Staunton Farm Foundation.

Tanya Babbar is an editorial intern at PublicSource and a junior at the University of Pittsburgh. She can be reached at tanya@publicsource.org. 

This story was fact-checked by Erin Yudt.

The Jewish Healthcare Foundation has contributed funding to PublicSource’s healthcare reporting.

The post In Pittsburgh’s Bhutanese community, ‘first aid’ for the struggle with mental health stigma appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Editor’s note: This story contains references to suicide. If you or a loved one are in need of immediate support, help is available 24/7 at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255.

As a Bhutanese refugee coming of age in Pittsburgh in the 2010s, I often heard of death. Death that happened to people, self-inflicted. I found myself on the periphery of the mental health crisis that seemed to have engulfed our community, though it was rarely talked about. Whispers of death everywhere. 

I remember hearing stories from my parents about the man who hanged himself in his three-bedroom apartment or about the funeral my mother attended for her co-worker’s spouse who had taken his life. And it was often his life. It seemed to me that they were almost always men. Most importantly, it seemed like this is just how things were, a matter of fact. 

It also seemed like a distant problem. I wasn’t particularly close to any of the victims. I was a teenager. The funerals were for people who were in their 30s or 40s. To me, 40 seemed like centuries away. I paid no mind to it; my job was to be a student. 

Until, one day, it touched a little too close to home.

On what seemed like a regular fall day, near our apartment complex in Baldwin Borough, a body was found hanging from a tree. My dad told us early in the morning. He told me first, and then he told my older brother who had been friends with the young man since we had become neighbors some five years before. They went to school together, they ate together, they traveled all over the city together. My experience was a passing one. I knew him through my brother. But I still knew him. And now he was dead. 

To a large degree, this was my first experience with the permanence of death. Some months earlier, I’d gone to the gas station where the young man had worked. My brother forced me, at the peak of my introvertedness, to make conversation as he got a pack of cigarettes for free. I listened as they talked about their plans. The young man talked about buying a house for his parents to finally move out of the apartment complex and about putting his sisters through college. And now he’s gone. 

His death was part of a wave of tragedies in Bhutanese refugee communities that cut across class and age lines, most acutely affecting men. 

The story of Bhutanese refugees

As a child, I was told frequently about the history of “our people.” Through oral history, the story goes that sometime in the 16th century the Kingdom of Bhutan sought immigrants from Nepal to work as farmers. Finding themselves settled in rural, far-flung but insulated villages, my grandparents spoke of still celebrating Dashin and Tihar, both Nepali holidays. In fact, my grandparents never learned Dzongkha, the language of Bhutan. Instead they spoke the same Nepali language the community had for centuries.  

However, this separate identity got them branded “lhotshampa” by the Bhutanese government, a term considered pejorative by some in the community. In the 1980s, as the “lhotshampa” asked for more political power, the government responded with a brutal crackdown. According to the stories from my parents and their parents, people disappeared from their homes at night. Bodies reappeared the following day in streams and creeks. Torture became rampant. 

I read stories contextualizing this oral history as an adult. Growing up, I remember hearing about distant uncles who had been tortured, leading to lifelong mental health problems. By the 1990s, almost all of the population had fled back to Nepal. Makeshift homes were constructed, and seven refugee camps were erected across southeast Nepal. Both sides of my family found themselves settling in the same refugee camp, the camp where I was born.  

Nepal itself was going through a political crisis, which led to an active civil war between Maoists and Monarchists. At some points, the war got so violent that I remember my mother telling me not to kick anything on the roads lest it be a makeshift bomb. In this environment, when the opportunity to resettle to become a reality, many families like mine took the chance and resettled in America. 

In Pittsburgh, the largest group of refugees by far are Bhutanese refugees of Nepali origins. In a similar pattern to older immigrant groups, my family found ourselves first taking refuge in affordable south Pittsburgh then moving into the outer boroughs along the Route 51 corridor. In these neighborhoods, one does not have to go too far to find a grocery store, restaurant or a community center catering to Bhutanese refugees. 

Depth of the problem 

After hearing about individual stories for years, I wondered if the source of the suicides is rooted in our collective refugee story. Now, as a 21-year-old, I wanted to understand the context behind my childhood. I learned that there was in fact a higher suicide rate for Bhutanese refugees, compared to the general U.S. population.

I also learned that this suicide epidemic followed the community from the refugee camps to the newly resettled homes in the United States. This led me to a 2013 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped me realize the depth of the problem and the possible causes, research that was corroborated by a more recent 2019 study published by Cambridge University Press. 

The report detailed what I have described before: Bhutanese refugees express post-traumatic stress but aren’t getting mental health diagnoses from medical professionals. 

All the stories I’d heard made sense in the context of an alarming statistic. The suicide rate among Bhutanese refugees was almost double the rate compared to the nation as a whole, according to the CDC report from 2013. 

After confirming that the stories I’d heard growing up seem to match statistics, I wanted to understand why the problem persisted. I considered the inequality I had seen within Asian Americans as a bloc and how persistent the income gap is for Nepali Americans (due to differences in demographic patterns of migration) or the language barrier and the challenges it presents. Or an intersection of both, combined with other factors. 

All of this I had understood implicitly but what was made more explicit by a doctoral thesis that I had stumbled upon recently were connections between economic success and the ability to speak competent English. I got lucky since the research was conducted here in Pittsburgh during the height of the crisis in late 2016 to early 2017. 

The thesis also helped answer another alarming question: Why is it disproportionately men? 

Raising families, working and acclimating to a new culture create access barriers to English language classes. These stressors would themselves make life hard but add onto this the expectation of masculinity, and I knew it was a potent mix. Having been raised as a man, I am aware of how both American and Nepali cultures value men being “the provider,” a task that is exponentially harder to do as a refugee. The burden of overcoming a language barrier as well as notions of masculinity are a tall order. 

After reflecting on the research and my own experiences, I sought out the solutions to the problem. I remembered my time volunteering with the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh [BCAP] as an interpreter from the time I was 16 to the beginning of the pandemic.

Filling the public health gap

In an effort to combat the problem, community organizations have taken to investing in mental health. BCAP, for example, has recently been working to connect Bhutanese refugees to a mental health helpline and a direct line to a BCAP staff member who can help in Nepali, bypassing the language barrier. 

Seeing the need for conversation, BCAP launched a Mental and Behavioral Health program. I talked to Madhavi Timsina, who was hired as program coordinator in 2020, about her experiences conducting home visits and talking to community members by phone. She shared how even just providing the space to talk in Nepali was valuable for community members.

“Majority of the time, they are not willing to share their thoughts,” she said. But after some time, “they start responding; they won’t stop because sharing their feelings will provide comfort in the mind.” She spoke about taking the time to simply talk to community members and to engage with them about their needs, especially with obstacles in place from the pandemic.

Simply seeing organizations like BCAP engage with the community about once-taboo subjects made me hopeful for the future. 

Even before having Madhavi at the helm, Executive Director Kara Timsina had been highlighting the need for mental wellness. He shed light on the timeline of deaths and provided some much needed optimism. He notes that there were “many cases” of suicide between 2010-2016, but that, “We have not seen such cases in Pittsburgh for some years now.” As a leader in the community, Timsina provided me with context for what I had experienced during what seems to be the worst of the mental health crisis. 

A couple of months ago, the grant funding Madhavi’s work with BCAP as the full-time staff member dedicated to mental wellness ended. With nobody focused specifically on mental health, the work will fall on BCAP’s already thinly stretched staff. As with other parts of life, the pandemic has laid bare the importance of talking about mental health. In the years preceding the pandemic, the crisis slowed, but the pandemic has showcased new challenges, making the necessity of resources for mental health more important than ever. 

Avishek Acharya is a senior at Duquesne University, majoring in political science and history. He is a Bhutanese refugee and has worked as a long-term volunteer for the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh. He can be reached on Twitter @avishekwastaken and on email: avisheka2@gmail.com.

The Jewish Healthcare Foundation has contributed funding to PublicSource’s healthcare reporting.

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