Why do so many “world-class” wellbeing programmes quietly fall flat in Asia?
Because most of what we’ve been taught about mental health was written somewhere else.
The frameworks. The models. The “best practices.” Much of it was built in the West — and then exported to the rest of us, as if it were universal.
It isn’t.
I’ve spent years working in the mental health space in Malaysia and across the Asian region. Asia is far from homogeneous, but across much of the region, I keep running into the same thing: how we build wellbeing, mental health, and resilience varies across cultures.
The Western model was shaped by an individualist worldview. The self is the unit. Healing is a personal journey. You go inward, you work on yourself, you recover — and often, you do it alone, in a room, one-on-one.
There’s real value in that. But it’s not the whole picture.
In a collectivist culture, like much of Asia, healing doesn’t happen alone. It happens in community.
The sense of belonging — being held by your family, your tribe, your people — isn’t a nice-to-have for recovery. For many of us, it is central to it. We regulate through relationship. We are steadied by knowing we are not carrying it by ourselves.
The work isn’t to reject Western psychology. It’s to stop mistaking it for the only psychology.
Because in this part of the world, we don’t heal alone.
We heal in communities.
This is the heart of the book I’m writing, and I’ll be sharing more over the coming weeks.
#culturalpsychology#mentalhealthAsia#resilienceacrosscultures
