Introduction to the Special Issue on Culture, Context, and Mental Health

Introduces the present special issue of the Asian American Journal of Psychology on Asian American Mental Health. This issue consists of a collection of articles presented at the second of two transdisciplinary conferences, titled Culture, Context and Mental Health, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the spring of 2010 and 2011. The goal of these two conferences was to generate transdisciplinary discussion and dissemination of research related to the prevention and treatment of mental illness in Asian American populations. In this issue, we compile a collection of articles that span a range of research approaches toward studying a variety of important issues involved with treating mental illness in Asian American populations. The range of approaches represented in these articles span the range from conceptual articles such as the one by Abe (pp. 168–180), which argues for a community ecological approach to studying and understanding the concept of mental illness in Asian American communities; the one by Nagayama Hall and Yee (pp. 181–193), which examines mental health policies; to empirical articles such as the one by Cheng, Lee, and Iwamoto (pp. 160–167), which examines the effects of drinking behaviors on mental health in Asian American men and women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)