As the war intensified, the remote Hmong villages of northern Vietnam endured attack after attack from raiding Communist parties. When the United States finally surrendered in 1975, it left thousands of displaced Hmong people and orphans in its wake. Thus began a mass exodus of Hmong communities, who were fleeing from the Communist soldiers seeking revenge in the north.
Some of these refugees were able to immigrate to the United States immediately. But the vast majority were forced to take asylum in Thai refugee camps, where they lived in extreme squalor for years, as they waited to claim a new life in America. The first wave of refugee immigrants came to the United States in the late 1970s; the final wave came in 2004.
But as we mentioned before, when these war-scarred refugees first arrived in America, there were no government agencies or nonprofits trying to help them get counseling, or even to explain the availability of therapy for what they had been through. In fact, PTSD did not become an official diagnosis in the United States until 1980, and it took years for this diagnosis to take hold among aid workers. And yet, once help was made available through behavioral health organizations, the Hmong communities didn’t seek out support, because they didn’t know about it or how to find it.
“’There was nothing of the sort,’” a Vietnamese-American doctor is quoted in the local newspaper. “There was not even [English as a second language training]. Counseling was just the furthest thing on anybody’s mind.’”
But without any type of counseling or education about PTSD and depression, many of these refugees, who had experienced extreme violence, went on to raise children with disturbed family dynamics and rapid changes in culture.
