On Wednesday, January 7th, The Serica Initiative hosted an vital and moving installment of its Serica Storytellers series: ROSEMEAD and the Realities of AAPI Mental Health. The panel was inspiring and heart-rending, featuring intimate and complex conversation about family, caregiving, grief, and the mental health crises that can shape our lives in large yet subtle ways.

A clip from the film ROSEMEAD started off the conversation, bringing together producer Mynette Louie, lived-experience storyteller Lisa Oberholzer-Gee, and therapist Jeanie Y. Chang for an honest examination of how mental illness is experienced — and often concealed — within families, particularly in Asian American communities.

The conversation began with ROSEMEAD, a film that explores one family’s experience navigating mental illness. Rather than positioning the film as a solution or statement, Mynette Louie spoke about storytelling as a way to create empathy — especially when language, resources, or cultural frameworks fall short.

She reflected on the long and difficult process of bringing the film to life, including the complicated and difficult stigmas that surround mental health, even in creative spaces. For Mynette, the goal was never to explain mental illness, but to humanize it: to unveil the emotional realities families face every day.

"Anything that you can be embarrassed by, anything you'd be ashamed by... it's just not talked about. We're all so familiar with that in Asian American culture, but we've never seen that on screen before, which is why we were so motivated to tell that story."

Mynette emphasizes the importance of lived experience by noting how personal these issues are for so many second generation Asian Americans, but conjunctly how the culture of shame they were raised around has not let a story like Rosemead center itself into the spotlight until now.

The conversation continued with Lisa Oberholzer-Gee as she shared her family’s experience caring for her brother who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his 20s. Her experience offers a visceral and rounded look into her life as both a family member and a caretaker. Her reflections touched on love, exhaustion, fear, and the ways families adapt, sometimes without ever naming what they are going through.

Her discussion shone a light on an important piece of all these stories: families doing their best with limited tools, shaped by cultural expectations around pride, privacy, and loyalty. Lisa not only spoke about hardship, but also about how connections and bonds remain, even after loss, and how storytelling can become

a way of honoring those relationships.

Lisa used the conversation to reflect on her relationship with her brother and parents, and her role as a caregiver. The understanding she has for her mother as the main support system for her brother is central in her viewpoint on mental illness being a struggle that can be a delicate balance for the whole family. She discusses these dynamics, caregiver burnout, and compassion.

"Afterwards, the scenes came back to me and I felt like, yeah I lived through that... It just made me think about how the family was vital... We wanted to show that we were survivors."

Therapist Jeanie Y. Chang moderated the conversation and helped situate these personal stories within a broader cultural and mental-health context, drawing from her work with individuals, families, and organizations. She named patterns that surfaced repeatedly throughout the discussion: silence as protection, stigma as inheritance, and caregiving as something expected but rarely acknowledged.

"We're talking about intergenerational trauma, and breaking that cycle as a therapist, but just in general, as I tell families, is something we should try to do."

Jeanie discusses how breaking the stigma in mental health in Asian American families comes from continuously noticing conversations and attitudes that can help to build connections and lower the shame in expressing concerns with mental health.

Why This Conversation Matters

What made the event especially powerful was its unfiltered honestly. The panelists did not offer neat resolutions or universal answers. Instead, they sat with their experiences and the complexities they faced: schizophrenia, gender identity, grief, caregiving, and the emotional labor of holding a family together when resources are scarce or unhelpful.

The audience was able to relate to the conversation through reflecting on their own lived experiences. The panel highlighted the personal stories many people carry quietly — caring for a family member, navigating one's own emotions, or growing up without the vocabulary to describe what was happening at home.

By the end of the evening, one thing was clear: breaking silence does not mean having everything figured out. Sometimes it just means recognizing what has always been there.

If you weren’t able to attend live — or if you want to revisit the discussion — the full recording of ROSEMEAD and the Realities of AAPI Mental Health is now available on YouTube.