“Open in Emergency” Explores the Asian American Mental Health Crisis — and Offers New Tools for Care
Tags: Projects We Love, Asian American, Mental Health, Kickstarter, Publishing

The tarot deck is a very different approach to mental health than the hacked DSM. Why create a mental health tarot deck?

Khúc: Yeah, the tarot deck is very different. The DSM more directly engages mental health. When we were first talking about the tarot cards, people were like, “What does that have to do with mental health?” Because they understand tarot cards as divination, as fortune-telling. And what does fortune telling-have to do with mental health? We actually think it has quite a bit to do with it.

Lawrence and I go to an annual conference where Asian American studies scholars get together and share their research. One year a friend of ours, during downtime after sessions, whipped out a deck of tarot cards and started doing tarot readings for people. Lawrence and I watched as he told people’s fortunes, as he had conversations about their experiences, their suffering, their futures. And we saw how meaningful this was for people, the kind of community space it was creating. We were like, something is going on here. This is a way of engaging our life that is dismissed among scientific thinkers.

We thought, what if we took the tarot and made it for Asian Americans, by Asian Americans? Using Asian American categories instead of European ones to make them more relevant to our communities, but also to draw on Asian American studies frameworks of understanding what Asian American life actually looks like. Could this create a new kind of wellness practice?

Davis: All of the tarot decks [we see today] are grappling with wellness and unwellness, at least indirectly. I think that in some ways the decks come out of this need to address the cultural moment that we’re in. There’s a real power to this form. It feels really empowering to be able to tailor and shift it according to the needs and wants of the community.

The practice also opens that power up to everyone who takes part in it because it’s so interpretive and requires this participation and connection. They are able to enter into this practice and create new practices of their own. To use the cards when and where and how it feels meaningful to them. In that interpretive ambiguity, that space of possibility, there’s so much potential for care, and for a kind of self-determination that people are really excited about.

From the AALR tarot deck

Have there been any responses to “Open in Emergency” that have really stuck with you?

Khúc: I’ve gotten responses from students who are engaging with it in the classroom; I taught the whole issue in my own class on Asian American mental health. The students were mesmerized by the project and the kinds of conversations it was opening up for them.

I remember a student, she was a psychology major and this was her senior year, saying that in all her years in psychology she had never heard anyone talk about mental health with such compassion and with such dignity for those who are experiencing mental health issues. That was so meaningful to me. And I’ve had people write to me saying that they’ve never seen themselves reflected in mental health materials before. To get resources that actually gave them tools to understand their lives was mind-blowing to them.

Davis: There were also two Asian American dancers named Amanda Ng Yann Chwen and Maddy Mikami who put together a dance film inspired by the [tarot] cards. That was really lovely to see and watch. Having it go out in the world in these unexpected places and seeing how people make use of it and make it their own has been really moving and powerful. It makes us feel like this project was worth doing. And worth, now that it’s sold out and we are no longer able to send it to people who need it, being able to recreate it and reproduce it, and send it out in the world again.