Inheriting: Leah & Japanese American Incarceration

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, we bring you an episode from Inheriting Season One. Inheriting is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations.  Leah Bash is an avid runner, a dog mom, a wife – and there’s a part of her family’s history she can’t stop thinking about. The fact that both sides of her family were incarcerated alongside 125,000 other Japanese Americans during World War II. Her father and his six siblings spent more than three years behind barbed wire at isolated camps in Manzanar, California and Crystal City, Texas. After Leah learns about her father’s struggles with panic attacks and is herself diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she starts to wonder: could those experiences at camp during World War II have far-reaching consequences a generation later?

Om Podcasten

Growing up, I was taught to say that I was “ok” when I really wasn’t. Mental health just wasn’t something that anyone in my family or community talked about or even had access to. Yet pretty much everyone was affected by it.  Today, young people of color are disproportionately affected by mental health issues and are not getting the resources they need, and I want to change that.   And this is why this podcast exists. Yeah No, I’m Not Ok, my new podcast made in collaboration with LAist Studios, is here to open up the conversation about mental health. Every week we will explore issues that youth face all over the world (addiction, depression, anxiety, suicide, radical self love, and much much more) through conversations with friends, colleagues, activists, artists and health care professionals, all people who have gone through something life-changing and are now healing from it.  We want to start a mental health revolution. A movement that can start by talking about how we feel. One where we’re not ashamed of our own human experience.  What will feel like simple conversations among friends will really become a complex narrative of what is happening right now, especially to young people of color. With a real and emotional sound and few easy answers, Yeah No, I’m Not Ok will hopefully become a critical show in a critical time, a place for you to bring your complicated feelings and spend time with people who are rooting for you. – Diane Guerrero This LAist Studios podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp and our listeners get 10% off their first month of online therapy at BetterHelp.com/LAist Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.