Catch Up with Research & Development
South Asian mental health data has long been buried inside broad categories — and the field is worse for it.
For decades, U.S. health surveys have aggregated every Asian ethnicity under a single label. The result is that the unique mental-health risk factors facing South Asian Americans — acculturation stress, intergenerational expectation, model-minority pressure — vanish from the dataset. Clinicians, public-health agencies, and even our own community physicians make decisions in the dark.
MHISA's R&D team built a name-based disaggregation algorithm that reaches 94% accuracy in identifying South Asian respondents within existing public datasets. We then re-ran the analyses for ourselves — and what came back changed how we talked about the work.
We are now publishing a series of disaggregated findings: prevalence of help-seeking behavior, ED utilization, and suicidality outcomes specifically for the South Asian American population. For the first time, the numbers tell our story.