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Investigating the Use of Services for Vietnamese with Mental Illness

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Abstract

An ethnographic-based interview was conducted with 324 Vietnamese-speaking adult caregivers living in the New South Wales state of Australia, focusing on types of services used for identifying and/or intervening for binh tam than (mental ill-health), difficulties encountered, and recommendations for enhancing services. Almost one in two interviewees (n = 158) had used such services during the previous twelve months, including those provided by local Vietnamese-speaking doctors (100%), Asian naturalists, spiritual healers, witchcraft doctors, herbalists, and folk healers (>50%), as well as mainstream psychiatric hospital facilities (50%) and community services (>30%). Descriptive data on the difficulties and recommendations were related to four major domains: accessibility, acceptability, accommodation, and affordability, explaining patterns of caregivers' help-seeking behaviors and their choices of services.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Health Sciences, Flinders University, P.O. Box 2100, Adelaide, S.A., 5001

    Tuong Phan

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  1. Tuong Phan
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Phan, T. Investigating the Use of Services for Vietnamese with Mental Illness. Journal of Community Health 25, 411–425 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005184002101

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