A Tarot Deck to Start Conversations and Save Lives
Mental health can be a taboo topic. In this essay, the editors of The Asian American Literary Review walk us through how they engaged their community in creating new tools to promote those conversations.
Kickstarter just turned 10. This essay by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis and Mimi Khúc, editor-in-chief and managing editor of the nonprofit The Asian American Literary Review, is part of a series that celebrates past projects and introduces a few new ones. Read more here.
Read our interview with Davis and Khúc to learn more about “Open in Emergency.”
For some time now, studies have pointed to a crisis of Asian American mental health — including alarming data on Asian American suicide and suicidal ideation rates, especially among college students. But nobody agrees on why this crisis is happening or how to deal with it. Existing approaches are not working. So in 2014 our arts nonprofit, The Asian American Literary Review, sat down to think about new possibilities.
What if, rather than trying to recalibrate our existing mental health resources to better engage race and Asian American experience, we started at the opposite end, with what wellness, unwellness, and care actually look like in Asian American life?
Enter our 2016 project, “Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health,” an anti-racist rethinking of mental health and an arts-based care package for our communities — including a deck of original tarot cards!
Here’s the story, in 10 images (actually, nine images and one video), of how it came into the world — twice.
1. We asked our communities what hurts.
“Open in Emergency” started with several dreaming sessions like the one pictured above, a student-run workshop at the University of Maryland in 2015. What hurts? we asked participants at these sessions. What forms could and should an arts-based mental health intervention take? What should its goals be? We listened, and we dreamed together.
2. We commissioned work that addressed our communities’ suffering.
By 2016, based on those collective dreams, we’d commissioned work from over 75 artists, writers, scholars, practitioners, and survivors. The special issue would be made up of five pieces: the aforementioned deck of tarot cards; a “hacked” version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which we called the DSM: Asian American Edition; a communal tapestry; a “treated” pamphlet on postpartum depression; and a stack of daughter-to-mother letters. Together, these pieces would reveal the wounds of our communities, trace the structures of violence that create these wounds, and offer possibilities for care.
Now, we just had to figure out how to pay for everything.
3. We figured out how to pay for everything.
Cue our first Kickstarter campaign. The response from backers was overwhelming: We met our modest goal of $10,000 in two days and ultimately raised over $23,000, getting covered in The Washington Post and NBC Asian America in the process.
4. We brought “Open in Emergency” to life IRL.
Following the issue’s publication in late 2016, we held events at a range of community spaces, including the one pictured above — an interactive pop-up wellness space built around the issue at the Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco, hosted in partnership with the mental health nonprofit Richmond Area Multi-Services (RAMS). The different stations in the space offered opportunities for self-reflection and intentional vulnerability, for connection and co-creation of new forms of care.
5. We also turned it into a TEDx talk.
“Open in Emergency” became the starting point for a series of public talks, including a TEDx talk on mental health by the issue’s guest editor, Mimi Khúc. Over the next two years, Mimi gave more than 50 public talks based on the issue at colleges and conferences across the U.S.
6. We received uplifting, validating feedback from our readers.
The positive feedback we received from readers of the special issue was overwhelming. Much of it echoed the Facebook post pictured here — readers felt seen and heard, felt validated. One teacher who used “Open in Emergency” as a course text said, “I really think this issue saved a life or two in my class.”
7. We couldn’t keep up with demand for the issue!
Within a year, we’d sold out of print copies of the special issue. Requests kept pouring in — from individuals, from classrooms, from spaces requesting donations — so we created a Google form to keep track of the requests and save contact info for everyone who’d want a copy of “Open in Emergency” if we ever managed a reprint.
The form filled up fast, and we realized a reprint couldn’t wait long…
8. We got to work on a much-requested reprint.
If we were going to do a reprint, we wanted it to have some new content. We asked readers where they felt there was room for expansion. Two areas came into focus: disability justice and environmental activism. So we commissioned a new tarot card, The Crip, from writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and new mock DSM entries by disability studies scholars Mel Y. Chen and Jina B. Kim. We also commissioned a new tarot card and mock DSM entry on emergencies and natural disasters from scholar and artist Simi Kang, and all-new visuals by artist Matt Huynh.
9. We asked students to share their stories.
Creating The Student tarot card may have been the most exciting part of this new project. Over the last five years, as we traveled around the country, we’d found Asian American students were hungry not only for new mental health resources but for spaces that give them permission to be openly unwell — and ask for better care.
“Open in Emergency” has always been about honoring and amplifying these students’ bravery. It has always involved their vision and has always served student communities. So it only made sense to create The Student collectively, as an act of listening to students all across the country. Rather than having one author, the card would gather the input we’d received from students on our many tour stops on college campuses. Pictured above is an event at Harvard, a pop-up wellness space which included a station for students to submit entries for The Student card.
Here’s what the Harvard students (and those from numerous other institutions) came up with. You’ll see it in the new card we publish as part of the reprint this fall.
10. We’re not done yet.
The Kickstarter campaign for the “Open in Emergency” reprint is live now. With our community’s support, we met our $10,000 goal within a week of our launch! Now we’re hoping to raise another $10,000 so we can donate copies to spaces in need. We hope you’ll help us bring this project to the people who need it most.
