Kim Counsels Virginia

Lecturer Josephine Kim spent approximately two weeks counseling and educating Korean Americans in Virginia following the April 16 shooting at Virginia Tech.

The effects of the mass shooting — in which Korean-American student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 25 — extended beyond the Virginia Tech campus. The Korean-American community-at-large was deeply hurt by Cho’s actions as well. Kim, who earned her Ph.D. in counselor education and supervision from the University of Virginia and is a licensed mental health counselor, was contacted by a Virginia Tech professor to aid the Korean-American and Asian populations of Virginia in dealing with their grief.

Kim left for Virginia only a few hours after she was contacted, eager to help where she could. “The school had done everything it could to provide appropriate services,” Kim says. “But Koreans were not using it. Many Koreans think that mental health problems bring shame on the family and that seeking help is a sign of weakness. The cultural stigma against speaking about emotional issues hinders many from getting the help they need.

“As a professional and someone whom they view as an authority figure with expertise in the area, I wanted to personally go and give [the Korean-American community] permission to seek services,” she continues. “It was important as an ethnically-matched person to give verbal consent, stating that we all need help, and there is nothing wrong with seeking and receiving services.”

Because Cho’s psychological struggles were documented in the press after the shooting, many Korean Americans’ disinterest in seeking professional help was compounded. “They now believed that since Cho’s history was made public; this, too, would happen to them if they receive professional help,” she says. “I had to reiterate the rules of confidentiality and that the only reason Cho’s history was made public was due to his crime.”

Kim met with hundreds of undergrad and graduate students, families, youth, and faculty members, the majority from the Asian community, where she discovered feelings of guilt, shame, and fear of retaliation, as well as hate crime anxiety.

While many individuals could rationalize that Cho was only one person and Korean Americans could not take the blame, many international students were haunted by his actions and the feeling of shame that one of “their own” had done this, Kim says.

Kim also traveled off-campus to communities heavily populated by Korean Americans, where she discovered similar feelings and a need for education about mental health services, including more education about recognizing emotional distress in troubled people such as Cho.

Kim plans to continue working with students groups from Virginia Tech. During the upcoming summer, Kim will spend her weekends in Virginia and Maryland and vacation time in Korea. Currently, she is organizing an August conference for Korean-American high school seniors in Virginia.

“I urge everyone to take matters of mental health more seriously, to become more educated about symptoms of emotional disturbance, to be more vigilant about signs of psychological distress, and to seek treatment at the first sign of illness,” she says.